“I moved on, too.”
“Think of me as Auguste Rodin, in a manner.” He spoke more formally than she had recalled, more carefully. And where did he get that Cary Grant faux-British accent? “I saw my future in this giant block of academic marble, and it was my calling to chisel it out. As the German philosophers would say, gesamtkunstwerk. I speak metaphorically, of course.”
“I’m not going to sue you.”
He stared at her worriedly, his thumb stabbing his chin cleft. If he had smoked a pipe, he would be puffing like mad. But when she broke into a smile, he relaxed—a little. On his credenza, his CD player was spinning Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen. He reached over, brushed aside some administrative detritus, and turned down the volume.
“In the old days, it would have been the Beatles,” she said.
“And rusted-out VWs and love beads,” he sniggered. “Well, some of us grew up.”
She pictured him stark naked, except for his Viking horned warrior helmet and fringed vest, running around the motel room role-playing Leif Ericsson discovering Newfoundland.
“Please, have a seat. Care for some tea?”
Instead of sitting, though, she padded in her Birkenstocks to the window. She gazed down at the campus triangle, its budding maple trees, newly green grass, and the DePewe State student center casting a rhomboid shadow over the lily pond, from which two maintenance men were dragging off plywood sheeting.
“Carl is still here,” she said, nodding at the older janitor. “Everything’s the same.” She nodded at the student union building. “Is the bowling alley still here? The ‘balling’ alley?”
“Diane, I—”
“I’m not here to blackmail you, Les.You know me better than that…don’t you? Students and professors did it all the time.”
“Times are different, trust me.”
“Those days were groovy.”
“It meant a lot to me, too,” he added, unconvincingly. “I’ll never be sorry about what we had.” He gazed at her dreamily, batting his lashes. Cynics might have taken his rapid blinking as a sign of deception, but for Diane it was a look that transported her back to the sensitive poetry-class lecturer she had fallen head-over-heels for all those years ago, and suddenly she was embarrassed by her own wrinkles, neck flesh, too-wide, middle-aged hips.
What torture it had been to contact him, although she promised herself to show nothing of her torment. She would be thoroughly decent. After all, it had been her choice not to have come forward sooner—and, for that matter, her choice not to do…certain things…in the first place.
And, as she had feared, now that she saw him again—officially, anyhow, for she had watched him several times from behind sunglasses in back seats of lecture halls—she fell in love with him all over again. He was still handsome and brilliant and thin and, though his writing had morphed from poetry to literary theory—whatever that was—when he spoke, he was hypnotizing. His long, complex sentences, stitched with discursive subordinate clauses, phrase slathered upon phrase, digression after digression, turned on themselves like eddying pools, only to eventually emerge into grammatical Valhalla—the syntactical equivalent of rapids rushing over a waterfall before settling into a placid alpine lake. She adored the way he used compound adjectives, convoluted modifiers that precariously dangled, metaphysical tropes, and Latinate roots with Anglo-Saxon appendages. She swooned at the way his nose twitched when he pronounced mellifluous four-syllable, hyphenated French verbs and manly, guttural German nouns. Her heart tangoed when he wielded obscure Middle-English words like a halberd, at his fearless defiance of verbal simplicity, his swashbuckling abstractions, protracted introductory gerund phrases, arcane predicate-nominatives. Her eyes rolled into her forehead when he fell into his dreamy—some would say monotonous, tedious, and wearying, but, then, they weren’t in love with him—professorial cadence. She melted when he would say things like “variegated” instead of “different,” “perambulate” instead of “walk,” “Homo erectus” instead of “dude,” “matrix of reproductivity” instead of “crotch.”
And even though one part of her—the brain part—suspected he was now saying nice things only because he was terrified she had come back to shake him down, another part—the heart (or as Les would say, the “cardio-muscular, arterial-vascular exchange”) part—tantalized her with the notion that he was sincerely glad to see her. In his deer-in-headlights way, he was darn cute. Maybe, just maybe, despite her fleshy neck, she turned him on again too, after all these years.
“So what have you been up to?” he asked, rocking squeakily. “Still writing poetry?”
“You remember.”
“Of course I remember.You were damned good, too. I had high hopes for you.”
“I haven’t written much lately—over the past, oh, twenty-seven years or so.”
“Why not? You have talent.”
She sighed. “But lack artistic courage.”
He puffed out his chest. “It certainly does require more than a soupçon of self-affirmation.”
“Maybe I’ll take it up again sometime.”
“I’d be delighted to render my opinion.”
“So,” she said, finally sitting, tapping her thighs with her fingertips. “Corner office and everything.”
“A superficial homage to bourgeois hegemony. An insult to the intelligence. They give us this instead of practical emoluments. Still, all these windows are somewhat salubrious.”
“They don’t teach actual literature anymore, I hear.”
“It’s far more enlightened this way, really.” He had slipped again into his Cary Grant accent. “No dead white males dictating our syllabi.”
“I know. I read your last book.”
“Shakesqueer? Marvelous! You always were more perspicacious than your peers.”
“You gave me an A,” she reminded him saucily.
“Yes, well,” he stammered. “Say, how about that tea? I can get Margie to run down—”
“I brought my own tips and strainer.”
He intercommed his secretary, even though her desk was ten feet away through an open door. “Can you bring Ms.”—he turned to Diane—“I assume it’s not ‘Doctor’?”
“No, but I did get my M.A. at night school.”
While they waited, they quickly brought each other up to date on their personal lives, with Les, rocking hobby-horselike, apparently trying hard to stay interested. Diane still lived in Rogers Park, had a grown daughter, Karma, the love of her life, who was going to be married this June. Les had given up his Wicker Park two-flat to his parasitic, unimaginative, flaccid, passive-aggressive ex-wife during their ugly divorce (she having felt threatened by his success, having let herself get flabby, and having had low self-esteem—though he couldn’t imagine why). Thank heavens they’d had no kids. “I say ‘heavens’ metaphorically, of course—being a proud atheist. Nothing’s changed there, all right.”
His secretary came in and handed Diane a cup of steaming water and a napkin. On her way out, she left the door ajar. Diane plucked a strainer and an envelope of chai buds from her purse, tapped out about half into the little colander, and poured the steaming water. She blew on it, whiffed deeply, and sipped. For several minutes, neither she nor Les spoke.
Finally, swiveling, his knee whacking the desk, he coughed, “So, what brings you back to DePewe after all these years?”
She took another sip, got up, and closed the door,