He kissed her and Adrienne was filled with awe. How had she survived ten days without his mouth on hers, his tongue, his lips, his body pressed against her body? How had she survived? It felt as though she had gone ten days without food, without water. Because she was hungry for him. She was starved.
7
Old Boyfriends
October 1, 2002
Dear Sully,
The one thing I remember my mother telling me about love was that you couldn’t hunt it down or sniff it out. Like all great mysteries in the world, my mother said, it just happened.
This summer was the best summer of my life. But although I wished for it and wanted it, love didn’t happen to me the way it happened to you. I can’t explain it any better than that. I hope someday you’ll forgive me for taking off like this, without warning, without good-bye. I thought this would be easiest-for me, certainly-but also for you.
If there was something else I could say, I would say it. Sorry, sorry, sorry.
Adrienne
CYSTIC FIBROSIS
Cystic fibrosis is a genetic disease affecting approximately thirty thousand children and adults in the United States. CF causes the body to produce an abnormally thick, sticky mucus, due to the faulty transport of sodium chloride within cells lining organs-such as the lungs and pancreas-to their outer surfaces. The thick CF mucus also obstructs the pancreas, preventing enzymes from reaching the intestines to help break down and digest food.
CF has a variety of symptoms. The most common is very salty-tasting skin; persistent coughing, wheezing, or pneumonia; excessive appetite but poor weight gain. The treatment of CF depends on the stage of the disease and which organs are involved. One means of treatment, chest physical therapy, requires vigorous percussion (by using cupped hands) on the back and chest to dislodge the thick mucus from the lungs. Antibiotics are also used to treat lung infections and are administered intravenously, via pills, and/or medicinal vapors, which are inhaled to open up clogged airways.
The median life expectancy for someone with CF is thirty-two, though some patients have lived as long as fifty to sixty years.
Before she met Thatcher, Adrienne had been down the road and around the bend with three and a half other men. The first, chronologically, was her academic adviser during her fifth year of college. Adrienne was twenty-two years old, trying to earn enough credits to graduate from Florida State. Her transcript-with courses from IU Bloomington and Vanderbilt, and AP credits from her high school in Iowa, not to mention two semesters at Florida State-looked like a patchwork quilt and smacked (so her father claimed) of a half-baked effort that was draining him of his savings. She had plenty of class hours and good grades but nothing that equaled a major. She had started out as elementary ed at IU, then at Vandy she switched to sociology with a minor in art history. Florida State didn’t have a sociology major, though they did have anthropology, which she could qualify for with twenty-six more credits. Or she could go the route of art history, but she felt this wasn’t a major that would ever present any career opportunities, and her father agreed.
Thus, the academic adviser.
The first time Adrienne met with Will Kovak, she barely noticed him. She was too agitated about her tattered state of affairs. Her father was right: She wasn’t taking college seriously, she was flitting around, unwilling to commit to a major or even a school. Sure, some people transferred once, but twice? She hadn’t made a lasting friendship or held on to a single interest since her mother died. She had toyed around with notions of law school (everyone she knew who didn’t have long-term concrete goals applied to law school); she considered becoming a personal trainer; she had taken a course called African Drumming and really enjoyed it; she wondered if she should drop out of school and get a job. But where? Doing what? Her father and Mavis pelted her with possible vocations. Mavis thought she should teach the deaf. Her father thought she should take the hygienist’s courses and join him in practice. Both of them thought she should see a shrink. With all these disturbing notions flooding her mind, Will Kovak registered only as a body behind a desk. His office was dark; the venetian blinds were pulled against the strong Florida sun. She could hardly see him. All Adrienne cared about was her transcript, which lay on his desk like a trauma patient. Could he save it?
“Psychology,” Will said, after reviewing Adrienne’s file for fifteen silent minutes, during which he referenced the college manual four times. “I can get you out of here in January with a degree in psychology if you take five classes this semester.”
Psychology? Adrienne laughed. She could be her own shrink! But psychology had a scientific, even medical, sound that would please her father. Without stopping to think, Adrienne stepped behind Will Kovak’s desk and hugged him around the shoulders. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you. Thank you.”
He was stiff; he gave her an embarrassed smile. “You’re, uh, welcome,” he said.
Adrienne met with Will Kovak a second time to figure out what the five classes would be and then a third time to have him sign her add-drop slip. It was during this third visit that Adrienne began to wonder about him. He was an associate professor of world literature, but he was only twenty-nine. And he was cute, in a bookish way, with longish hair that curled at the neck and rimless glasses. Adrienne had hooked up with a few guys at beer parties, but these guys struck her as young and clueless, and because Florida State was as big as some developing countries, she never had to see them again. She hadn’t been on a date since her first junior year at Vanderbilt, when Perry Russell took her out for fried chicken then talked her out of her virginity. She was ready for something different. She asked Will out for coffee, and after a very long, very awkward silence with Adrienne standing there in the near-dark and Will staring at his folded hands, he said yes.
In this way, the first real relationship of Adrienne’s life began. She entered the peculiar universe of young academics. It seemed to Adrienne that in these circles the person with the most abstemious lifestyle was the most worthy of admiration. Adrienne and Will attended the free foreign film series sponsored by the university, they went to readings at the bookstore, they went for coffee, and, at Adrienne’s insistence, splurged on the occasional beer at Bullwinkle’s. They studied together at the library and they spent every night making love on Will’s futon in the condominium unit that his parents bankrolled. The condo had a tiled bathroom and a gourmet kitchen with an island and granite countertops, but it was as if Will were embarrassed by these amenities and, to make up for them, he kept the rest of the condo as spartan as possible. The living room was dominated by two card tables pushed together and covered with an Indian print tapestry and piled with books and Will’s laptop computer (also bankrolled by the parents). The bedroom had just the futon mattress on the floor, a row of votive candles on the windowsill, and a boom box on which Will played his favorite kind of CD-the movie soundtrack.
Adrienne was out of place from the beginning. Amid all the older, unwashed, ramen-noodle eating, Edward Said-reading, quiet smart people, she was a dilettante undergrad who had a steady source of cash from her doting dentist father. She liked to sit by the pool, she liked to watch David Letterman, she had zero interest in grad school. Every so often, Will would drag Adrienne to a “party” thrown by one of his teaching assistant friends. These were usually held in an un-air-conditioned studio apartment where graduate students and young professors, many of them foreign, drank very cheap Chianti, smoked clove cigarettes, listened to Balinese gamelan music, and talked about topics so erudite they might as well have been speaking another language. Adrienne hated these parties, and when she complained about them to Will, he confessed that he hated them, too, but the danger in not going was that they might gossip about him.