All This Talk of Love (25 page)

“You’re going to make a great teacher,” he says.

“And for the record, I already have my passport.”

It had taken two months of movie dates and Socratic questioning and hand-in-hand walks through Harvard Square for Kelly Anne to agree to sleep with him, and since that night (February 1, a date to which she refers with gravity), she has shown alarming flashes of wifeliness. More than once, she’s braved the dorm kitchen to cook him real dinners—Irish stew, broiled salmon, turkey tetrazzini—and served it to him on real plates, with stainless steel silverware and linen napkins, in the lounge. She’s called him from the Rite Aid pay phone to ask which toothpaste and soap he preferred, since she was restocking and might as well get something they both liked.

Th
e window for telling her about Birch has closed. Before February 1, she might have found the information intriguing and sexily dangerous; after February 1, it would count as a betrayal, a symptom of his rotting soul. She has given herself to him, and in return she expects his loyalty, if not his consistent emotional availability. As a lover, Kelly Anne is, surprisingly, as wild and generous and attentive and thorough as Birch is impatient and demanding. Sparing no part of him, she approaches each act with the assured serenity of a sculptor or a surgeon. One day she will find a better man, her own age, to spoil.

As he walks across the BC campus, past the towering cathedral, through the dissipating fog, a poem comes to him.
Th
e first lines: “Well, I have lost you; and I lost you fairly; / In my own way, and with my full consent.” Edna St. Vincent Millay, Frankie remembers, minor but notable.
Th
e poem had spoken to him, though he’d yet to lose anyone he’d loved in a romantic way.
Th
e next lines: “Say what you will, kings in a tumbrel rarely / Went to their deaths more proud than this one went.” Even then, he’d found that metaphor fitting: relationship as sovereign in an execution cart. He has forgotten the middle, but the last lines go something like, “Should I outlive this anguish—and men do— / I shall have only good to say of you.” Sentimental, yes, Millay, but a fine craftswoman, like a weaver of intricate but tacky baskets. Frankie turns, walks backward, as if he can see Kelly Anne from here—sitting up in her bed, textbook on her lap even though it’s her day off, a pack of multicolored highlighters on the pillow where Frankie’s head just lay, a mug of English breakfast tea steaming on the windowsill—and repeats the last nine words of Millay’s poem.
I will have only good to say of you.
Th
ere is no sadness to outlive, of course—not yet, not yet—but Frankie’s philosophy has always been to expect the worst, to steel himself, to inoculate.

To that end, he reaches into his satchel, finds the smallest interior pouch, unsnaps it, and fingers the bag of pot that Chris Curran, the stoner medievalist, the Big Winner, unloaded on him after the dissertation fellowship convinced him he should quit once and for all.
Th
e bag had been full when Curran handed it to him in the West Hall men’s room two months ago, but since then Chris has dropped by the apartment more than a few times to “say hey,” his code for a raid of his old stash. Rarely has Frankie joined in. He’s had no urge.
Th
e drug makes him giddy and slow witted and excitable—in other words, useless if he’s to sleep or get work done or satisfy two demanding women. To brave the passport office, on the other hand, to wait in line with the masses of the American traveling public, Frankie couldn’t ask for a more useful tool.

He walks several blocks through the hilly neighborhoods of Tudor mansions and wide, sloping lawns that surround BC, looking for a gardener’s shack or a patch of densely packed trees, but can find neither.
Th
ere are stone pillars and gates at the feet of the driveways. Daffodil beds surround the mailboxes. He thinks of Birch, who likely lives in a house like this, Dr. Z. having made a fortune in the private sector before sliding down the ladder to academia. She calls Frankie’s Stowe Street apartment “Iron Gates” after its pitiful attempt at a grand second-floor terrace. In the beginning of their entanglement, back when the stakes were low, Frankie and Birch had role-played caretaker and lady at Iron Gates and used to joke that they’d have been better off as a couple in nineteenth-century Britain, where people knew their place.

Th
e last time he saw Lady Chatterley, there was no conversation, not a single word, to record in his journal. He found the note in his mailbox, hoofed it home, left the front door open, stripped down to his boxers, and beckoned her into his room; less than a half hour later she was fully dressed and grunting good-bye. No more repeat performances, no more pillow talk. D. H. Lawrence might have approved of this exchange, and Frankie can’t say it doesn’t scratch a certain itch that even Kelly Anne’s sweetly ferocious stamina can’t reach, but he misses the
words.
Th
ey’d had the words back in the early days, when they would spend equal time in the sack and at the kitchen table, gossiping, revisiting arguments from her African lit seminar. Obscure lines from Soyinka and Spivak and Salih spilled forth from Birch’s lips as naturally as her name and address.
Th
e Professor’s mind had thrilled Frankie before he’d even registered the litheness of her body, and at first he’d felt he’d won both on a game show, the grand prize! Now her body is a consolation that fails to console.

He turns the corner and ends up on Commonwealth Avenue.
Th
ere’s a gas station–minimart that backs up to some woods. He buys a tin of breath mints and a lighter and trudges down a faint path through the trees, a shortcut no one seems to have taken in a while.
Th
e ground is hard, the leaves stiff and cold. March in Boston. Under the branches of a dried-up pine, he fishes Curran’s bowl from his satchel, packs and sparks it, and fills his lungs with smoke. He holds in the smoke as long as he can, then coughs it out. When Curran does this, the entire process is as smooth and natural as peeling a banana, and afterward Frankie notices no change at all in the guy’s demeanor.
Th
at’s what makes Curran an addict, he supposes. Frankie’s own
inability to stop coughing at this moment confirms his amateur status, as does the cloudiness that immediately fills his head. Still, the woods, as he finds the trail again, go as pleasantly flat and distant as the set of a school play, and he is the lone actor stepping across the stage.

He arrives at the passport office on Causeway Street in time for the lunch rush, takes a number, and waits on a bench among a crowd of surprisingly normal-looking people. He expected the blighted supplicants of the DMV, but of course anyone in line at the passport office seeks to abandon the United States for another culture, for a while at least, and that alone lends them virtue.

He sits, red pen in hand, rereading the chapter on
Midnight’s Children,
which he’s finally finished, twice revised, and had peer-reviewed by two of his cohorts. Try as he might, he can’t find a single example to cut. No matter what his cohorts say, if the example wasn’t essential to his argument, he wouldn’t have included it in the first place.
Th
e chapter is ready.
Th
e other chapters—some Birch-approved, some Birch-ignored, each skimmed in recent days with the help of his red pen—are also ready. He’s approaching the next phase of his work, which will require him to choose the right chapters to put in the diss, then make resonant links among them. He will start this next phase the day he returns from Italy. In the meantime, he’ll attempt to take what’s known to the wider world as a “vacation,” even though he’s ill equipped for such a thing. If he didn’t have the Rushdie chapter with him today and was forced to sit alone on this bench with his undirected thoughts, he’d have succumbed to panic.

When his number is called, the agent, a possum-faced guy with cheeks so dry they look burnt, greets him with the charm and enthusiasm of a cigarette machine. Still, he takes Frankie’s money and DS-11 form and birth certificate and IDs and eyebrow-ring-less photo and does a bunch of joyless stamping and typing. He hands back the IDs with a receipt and says to expect the passport to arrive in the mail in four to six weeks.

“Four to six
weeks
?”

He points to the part of the form that clearly states,
PASSPORTS ISSUED 4–6 WEEKS FROM DATE OF SIGNATURE
. “Is that a problem?”

His heart skips a beat. “I’m supposed to leave for a family trip on March twenty-fifth!”

Th
e man looks at the calendar, looks back at him, wrinkles his nose.

Frankie’s eyes well up. For a moment it’s just the two of them in a duel of stares. Except Possum-Face has all the power, and Frankie can only beg, though he’s filled with rage.
Th
is smug man will keep him from his family, from walking his mother through the olive grove. Without this man’s help, Frankie will not be there when she walks up the hill and, for the first time in fifty years, finds her brother and sister and first love waiting for her at the top of it.
Th
ey are hoping for a miracle in Santa Cecilia, for time to go in reverse, for her to find her memories, but Frankie won’t see it, won’t make the trip he’s come not only to want but to need. He hasn’t quite known this until now, when it’s about to be taken away. “Oh God,” he says, rubbing his eyes. “You don’t understand. My mom—she’s sick.
Th
is might be the last time she can come with us. Isn’t there anything you can do—”

“Sir,” says Possum-Face, “
th
is is a regional office. You can have your passport
today
if you need it. Most people don’t. It takes just a few minutes.”

“Today?” Frankie says. He rubs his eyes. “Jesus. Why didn’t you say so?”

“I was about to,” he says kindly. “You didn’t give me a chance.” And then Possum-Face smiles in that earnest way, with his lips turned in—a smile that says, I’m my mother’s son, too—and when he does, he’s not so ugly, not so burnt.

“
Th
ank you,” Frankie says. If there were a tip jar, he’d empty his pockets.

When Frankie does reach into his pocket, on the way out of the passport building onto blustery Causeway Street, he finds one of Kelly Anne’s quarters. She expects an update. But he knows what she’ll say if he gives her one: that he should have sent in his application weeks ago when she reminded him, that he should see this as further evidence that he needs her in Italy to manage his affairs. He checks his watch: twelve thirty. Birch is in office hours. She holds them on Friday afternoons because they are the least popular with students. He finds a pay phone, dials her West Hall number. When it rings, he hangs up.
Th
e phone eats the quarter.

Th
ere must be a Bruins game at the Boston Garden tonight because, all around him, packs of grown men malinger in gold jerseys, shouting at each other. Frankie doesn’t come to this part of the city, with its dingy sports bars and screeching elevated trolleys, unless he’s on his way to an Italian restaurant in the North End, but even those visits are rare. He avoids the Italian section. All those restaurants, one after the other up and down the narrow streets, remind him of the Al Di Là, except in none of them would he find his father sweet-talking the customers or his mother adjusting the drapes or Zio Giulio with his accordion or his ten-year-old self hiding under a booth. He certainly won’t find his father’s homemade pasta and veal cutlets and garlicky sautéed spinach, or his mother’s
frittelli
and deep-fried smelts, all prepared with hundred-year-old recipes and fresh ingredients and love. When he’s home, Frankie devours every dish his parents set before him, thinking, with each bite of the endangered and unrepeatable flavors, that they will soon disappear, irretrievably, and the rest of his life will be spent in longing. Does Ryan, who will eat at the Al Di Là every day this summer, and possibly for the rest of his life, understand how lucky he is?

He hits a 7-Eleven, buys a large bag of salt-and-vinegar chips, and stands at the window overlooking the street, stuffing the chips in his mouth like a junkie.
Th
en he buys a chili dog with extra chili.

He calls her again.
Th
is time, he lets it ring, and his fear comes true: she answers.

“
Th
is is Professor Birch.”

“Hey” or “hello”? He chooses, “Hey there, it’s Frankie. Are you with a student?”

“No,” she says. “Students don’t like me.”

“I can’t imagine why.”

He hears the sound of her office door closing. “Are you calling for a reason? It’s Friday, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, it’s Friday,” he says. “I just—this is a business call, actually. I’d like to discuss my diss soon. Just the diss, that’s it. We haven’t really, you know,
talked
lately. About that.”

“Well, these are my office hours. I’m on the clock, so let’s talk.” She must sense that this stings him, because right after she says it, her voice changes. “Or did you want to come by? No reason why you shouldn’t come by.”

“I’m not on campus,” he says. “I’m downtown. Are you free in, like, two hours? I know that’s off the clock . . .”