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THIRTY-THREE
It was an unusually cold January all over, with record low temperatures from New York to Florida—where the citrus crops were destroyed, nesting sea turtles were brought into hotel rooms to keep from freezing, and manatees huddled around the warm currents coming from electrical plant pipes—but in Fairwick it was arctic. For most of the month the temperature stayed in the single digits. Who wouldn’t choose to hibernate? Each day I drew Ralph’s shadow and burnt it while repeating the spell for safe travel, but he remained soundly asleep. When I put him back in his basket I’d find myself wanting to crawl back into bed instead of tromping through the snow to lecture a class full of sleepy college students in an overheated classroom.
It was perfectly normal, I told myself, that I’d want to crawl back into bed when I came home from campus and that I’d want to spend all weekend curled up on the library couch with Liam. It’s not as if we made loveallthe time. Sometimes we’d read and Liam would make tea and cinnamon rolls at 4:00. Sometimes we’d watch old movies. Liam, as I’d guessed from his Facebook page, loved the same romantic comedies I did—the old classics likeBringing Up Baby, It Happened One Night, andThe Philadelphia Storyand also their modern counterparts, likeAnnie Hall, Sleepless in Seattle, andYou’ve Got Mail. He knew them all practically line for line, and yet they still seemed to surprise him.
“They start out not liking each other, but then they fall inlove. They keep fighting even while they are falling in love. Why is that? Do they have to start out not liking each other to fall in love?”
“It makes a better story,” I told him. “It would be too easy if they liked each other from the beginning and the things that irk them about each other…Well, maybe those are things they really are looking for but are afraid to believe exists.”
“Is that why they’re always with other people in the beginning? Because they’ve given up on finding the right person and settled for the wrong one?”
“Maybe,” I said, wondering if he was thinking of me and Paul—or him and Moira. When we got to the part inYou’ve Got Mailjust before Tom Hanks appears in Riverside Park and Meg Ryan finds out that her secret pen pal is really the man who put her out of business, Liam asked, “If I lied to you about something that big—pretending to be someone I wasn’t—would you be able to forgive me?” he asked.
“Uh-oh, don’t tell me, you’re a spy from the Dahlia LaMotte Society and you’ve been having wild, passionate sex with me just to gain access to her papers.”
I hoped the reference to “wild, passionate sex” would divert him—perhaps toward some more of the same—but instead he became even more agitated. He got up and started pacing back and forth in front of the bookcases.
“All these books you read and write about, yourromances, do you think they really tell the truth about love?” He plucked a copy ofEvelinafrom the shelf. “Could a person read them and learn how to be in love?”
“They’re not operating manuals,” I snipped, growing irritated now. I didn’t have the energy for a philosophical debate on the nature of love. Or maybe he’d hit a nerve. I sometimes wondered if the reason I read romances was to figure out what it meant to be in love. But then I sometimes worried that reading all those romances had left me dissatisfied with love in real life. “There’s no such thing. People learn to love from experience.It takes time. You can’t study it like studying the piano or economics…”
Perhaps it was my choice of economics with its reminder of Paul that teed him off.
“Then what good are they?” he asked, lobbingEvelinaacross the room and then stomping out of the library.
“Hey! That’s a 1906 edition!” I called after him. I considered following him, but I suddenly felt too tired—tired of Liam’s outbursts and just plaintired. I burrowed into the couch, covering myself with the fluffy alpaca throw that Phoenix had bought. It still smelled like Jack Daniel’s and Shalimar. The thought of Phoenix made me feel sorry for myself. Everybody left. Phoenix. Paul. Now Liam. I’d worked myself up to a good cry when Liam came back, repentant and smelling like the outdoors. His forehead was cool when he pressed it against mine.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Do you want to watch the rest of the movie?”
“No,” I said, wrapping my arms around his neck. “I think we ought to get you some more experience in the art of love.”
“Oh,” he said, scooping me up in his arms and heading for the stairs. “Like this?”
“Rhett Butler One-Oh-One—yes, exactly like this.”
As January slid into February, I had to admit that my constant fatigue was more than the effects of lots of sex. Something was wrong with me. Since I didn’t have a family doctor in the area yet, I went to the school infirmary before my class. After walking through a light snow I found a crowded waiting room full of sniffling, bleary-eyed students and a harassed nurse.
“What’s going on?” I asked when I signed in—I recognized some students’ names on the sign-up sheet: Flonia Rugova and Nicky Ballard and also Richie Esposito, whom I remembered from the creative writing class. “Is it swine flu?”
The nurse, whose ID badge identified her as Lesley Wayman,held up a finger for me to wait while she sneezed. “No,” she said. “That’s mostly passed. There’s something else going around. Dr. Mondello thinks it’s mono, although so far the tests have all come back negative.”
“What were their symptoms?” I asked.
“Fatigue, night sweats, anemia.”
“Huh. I have the fatigue, but I haven’t noticed any night sweats…” I said, but then I realized, blushing, that I did sweat a lot at night—but that was because of what I wasdoingat night. And I had no idea whether I was anemic or not, although I never had been before.
“Have a seat,” Nurse Wayman said. “The doctor will be with you as soon as she can.”
I sat in an uncomfortable plastic chair—the only seat left—and took out a pile of papers to grade. The room was certainly quiet enough to get some work done. The only noise was the hiss of the steam heaters and the muted whisper of MP3 players plugged into many of the students’ ears. I graded two papers—adding the scratch of my red pen to the hushed atmosphere—before noticing something peculiar. I was sitting in a room full of college students and no one was talking. Shouldn’t a group of eighteen-to-twenty-two-year-olds, all attending the same small college, have something to say to one another?
I looked up and scanned the room’s occupants. Directly across from me, sprawled in a too small chair, was a shaggy-haired boy with a goatee and silver nose ring. I recognized him from Liam’s class, but didn’t recall his name. Wes? Will? Waylon? Something with a W. Or maybe I thought that because a flyingW—the trademark of the band Weezer—was tattooed on his neck. His eyes were closed, his head bobbing to the music leaking tinnily out of his plastic ear buds…or no, actually, his head was nodding because he was asleep. Each time his head fell heavily forward he snapped it up again and made a strangled gurgle. It was painful to watch but also ateeny bit funny. I looked around to see if anyone else was noticing his nodding-out performance, but everyone else was either asleep or staring vacantly into space or out the windows at the now heavily falling snow. Not only wasn’t anyone talking, no one was even reading, writing, or sketching. The only person who even had a book in her lap was Flonia Rugova, who I noticed now curled up in the one comfortable-looking sofa. I got up and went over to her. She flinched when I put my hand on her shoulder.
“Professor McFay, where did you come from? I didn’t see you there.”
“I’ve been sitting here for fifteen minutes, but I didn’t notice you either. I was grading papers. I’d say you didn’t see me because you were so engrossed in your book, but although I’m not an expert on Czech, I’m pretty sure you don’t read it upside down.”
Flonia glanced down at the book in her lap—Czeslaw Milosz’sCollected Poemsin the original. “Oh,” she said. “I’m reading it for the independent study I’m doing with Mr. Doyle and Dr. Demisovski. It’s really great but somehow I read two lines and then find myself staring into space.” She yawned. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I seem to sleep all the time and I have such strange dreams…”
