All This Talk of Love (29 page)

Heavy wood pedestal tables line the dining room, upside-down glasses twinkle above the marble bar, photos of mayors and senators line the front hallway.
Th
e dessert fridge hums, filled with homemade zuppe inglese and tonight’s special,
palle di neve.
“Ciao, Ciao Bambina” plays on the stereo. Antonio could run up and down kissing the walls and the floor and every woman and man who steps through the door. If only he could hold this room as it is today, keep it from passing into the next stage, whatever that stage would be—but that’s more sentimental feeling.

“In a few days, then,” says DiSilvio, “I’ll come back with the papers ready to sign.”

Mario stands on a chair in the corner, opening night 1955, tapping his wineglass to get the room’s attention. Maddalena’s at the front door, at the five-year anniversary party, to welcome the customers, take their coats, show them to the bar. Tony’s at her feet, his arms around her knees, and then, as she turns to kiss one of the guests, he’s grown, he’s carrying a tray of dishes to the kitchen. Prima’s at the far booth taking an order, her hair long to her shoulders—when did she cut it?
Th
ese rooms have held them all—even Frankie, over at the chalkboard, writing down the specials when he should be memorizing them.
Th
ey’re all still here.

“You’ll talk this over with your family in the meantime?” DiSilvio asks. “Antonio?”

“Of course,” Antonio says. He shakes his old friend’s hand. He has no intention of discussing this conversation with anyone, and DiSilvio must know this, too. It’s not what their fathers would have done.

FORSAKEN, WANDERING. SUCH
is Frankie’s life, the life of the scholar, in summer in a college town.
Th
e libraries close at dusk and open at noon, equipped with a skeleton crew of international students who can’t help Frankie locate the men’s room, let alone the obscure journal that just might include the missing piece of his jigsaw-puzzle dissertation, the piece that will convince his new adviser of the brilliance that is the Big Idea. For weeks, Frankie’s traversed alone the stark, sunbaked terrain of Boston’s many educational institutions, his knapsack of provisions (Fanon, Freud, Foucault) strapped to his back, searching for that missing piece among the various archives and special collections with which Boston is famously lousy. He avoids BC, lonesome at any season, unbearable with Kelly Anne in Jersey. Most days he ends up back on his home turf, beleaguered, grouchy, squeezing what blood he can from the familiar stones.

Th
e view from Frankie’s West Hall office is of inner-city kids on the quad, shrieking in their cornrows and tennis camp T-shirts, gobbling up boxed lunches. Last week he watched a garden club tour the flower beds and peel bark from the ancient elm behind the admissions building. It’s distressing how the college whores itself out to such groups. He knows of at least one professor forced to hold his seminar in his apartment because the university rented all leftover classrooms to a national conference of phlebotomists. If the trustees treat the place like a low-rent convention center, should it be a wonder the students and faculty don’t aspire to excellence?
Th
ere is a direct correlation, in Frankie’s unsolicited opinion. He doubts Harvard would allow thousands of needle-packing phlebotomists to trample its sacred ground.

Today, restless, Frankie wanders up and down the corridors of West Hall reading outdated flyers, inanely checking his mailbox every half hour, chitchatting with one of the work-study kids about the creatures thriving in the communal fridge, and generally wasting time. In an hour he’ll head home for lunch and his soap.
Th
ere’s that, at least, to look forward to.

Th
e mailboxes have been newly updated for the incoming fall master’s candidates. Gone are the slots for the two (two!) students who managed to finish and defend this academic year: old Maud Benson and, of course, Annalise
Th
eroux. Frankie harbors no ill will toward Maud, who began her dissertation in the late sixties, survived two forms of cancer in the seventies, climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro in the eighties, and spent the nineties revising. Maud’s ideas are long irrelevant, and she’ll never find a job in the current market, but good for her for closing the loop. Not so Annalise. Much ill will remains harbored, fellow loser or not. Her work is unfailingly au courant, and rumor has it she’ll soon jump full steam onto the tenure track at Amherst.

As for Chris Curran, he’s used his windfall to spend six weeks in England, where, he assured Frankie the last time he raided his stash, the landscape will serve as his muse.

Frankie’s day will come. It’s just a matter of time. Patience is required, along with thoughtful synthesis of his ever-multiplying dissertation chapters, ruthless cutting, and the connection of seemingly randomized dots. His new thesis adviser, Professor Avery Gadkari, himself a biracial product of postcolonial India (a human emblem of the document’s most salient arguments! Why did he not choose him from the start?) has been clear about the above requirements, much clearer than Professor Rhonda Birch, herself a tangent, a digression, a symptom of the dissertation’s fatal flaw: its ambitious, at times radiant, but ultimately incoherent
sprawl.

When Frankie told Gadkari he just needed one more text to bring the New Idea together before he could start pruning, Gadkari eyed him skeptically. It was the end of the term, and no doubt he’d hoped to wash his hands of Frankie before summer, given how far along the boy was and how “enthusiastically” Dr. Birch had recommended him. “Addition by subtraction,” Gadkari told him. “Trust me.
Th
e last thing this thesis needs is another text.”

Gadkari, like most of the professors, rarely appears in West Hall in the summer. Mostly it’s Frankie and work-study college kids and the department secretary, barricaded in her air-conditioned room at the top of the stairwell. Still, when he passes the professor’s office, he stops for a few moments to listen for shuffling or the tapping of keys.

Frankie’s mailbox, when he checks it for the last time before lunch, contains, to his astonishment, a single sheet of department letterhead. He looks quickly around. Birch’s door has been shut all morning, he’s sure of it. What would she be doing here, anyway? Last he’d heard, she’d planned to spend the summer on Martha’s Vineyard, where Amos had built her a house; but that was back in April, when they’d run into each other in the hallway and were forced to speak.
Th
e note is unmistakably Birch’s: a smiley face and, beside it, a question mark. Frankie stares at it and then, because he is a weak man and has little, if not nothing, not even his pride, to lose, now that she’s initiated the backslide, crosses out the question mark, writes “why not” in lowercase letters (uppercase would be too conciliatory), slips it under her door, and waits a few moments for her shadow to pass across the slit. It does.

Halfway down College Ave, just before Vinny’s Pizza, he senses her. When he turns, she is there, a block and a half behind, keeping discreet pace. After the Oak Room snub, she’d sent him a maddening e-mail apology at 1 a.m., one that, if he read it correctly, blamed Frankie—yes, Frankie—for getting himself stood up, for not recognizing her idea as terribly unwise, un-Birch-like, and unlikely to transpire. If he truly understood her, the e-mail had implied, he wouldn’t have shown up, either. He didn’t write back.

Rather than acknowledge him now on the street, Birch checks her watch. He speeds up. As he turns the corner, his hand’s in his right pocket to adjust his boxers, to maintain discretion.

His room’s a wreck. Two weeks ago, he’d printed out all 478 pages of his dissertation—200 or so too many—and arranged them in piles on the dresser, desk, bed, and floor. Among the stacks of paper: dirty and half-dirty clothes, coffee mugs, plates crusted with peanut butter, shoes, books, mix tapes. Earlier this summer, at one of their rare house meetings, Anita had asked him to be “more mindful” of the common areas now that her “friend” Whitney was visiting 25 Stowe on a regular basis. Now all his stuff has moved into his bedroom.

Th
e front door slams, and he stands, arms crossed, at the top of the stairs to greet her. “So, look who actually showed up.”

“Let’s not talk,” she says. “Not yet, OK? We’ll ruin it.”

“Fine,” he says, because what other response can a man have—even a man of letters, even a man scorned—to her too-tight “Rosie the Riveter” T-shirt, jean shorts rolled up at the thigh, tanned legs, and red toenails, her body moving closer, removing her sunglasses, crooking her arm around his shoulder?
Th
ey kiss right there in the dining room in full view of the neighbors, a first, until he pulls her into his room and guides her around the trash to his futon. Her eyes are closed. She could be kissing anyone, he thinks, but he doesn’t mind, not in this moment, at least. He’s missed their electricity.
Th
ey fall onto the mattress, half on, half off the Ngugi chapter he’d needed her opinion on nine months ago. Below her navel is a new tattoo, a goddess—Athena?—whose face he kisses. He unsnaps the top button of her shorts, scoots her toward the window. Her ass smashes the pages. He goes for the second button, but she stops his hand.

“I shouldn’t be here,” she says, her eyes finally open.

“No shit,” he says. “
Th
at just occurred to you? If you leave now, I swear—”

She scoots away from him, lowers her head. “I’m a mess, Frankie.
Th
e human equivalent of this filthy room.”

“Embrace the filth.” He tries again for the button.

“I want you to tell me something,” she says.

“Oh God,” he says. “I thought we weren’t ruining it.”

She straightens her back, rolls her eyes.

“Look,” Frankie says. “I’m still pissed off. You’ve got all this guilt. I’ve got all this rage. Let’s channel it.” He smiles. “
Th
en I’ll tell you what you want me to tell you.”

“I’m serious.”

He sits back on his ankles, still straddling her.
Th
ey’re barefoot but otherwise fully clothed. “Fine, Rhonda. What do you want?”

“I want to know how I’m seen.”

“How you’re s
een
? Which means . . . ?”

She turns her head toward the TV. “
Th
is morning, when I was putting my T-shirt on and fixing my hair and deciding if I could get away with these girly sandals, I thought, for the millionth time, It’s a costume, I’m playing a part.
Th
at’s no big shocker, of course; we both know everyone performs their genders, blah blah blah.
Th
en it occurred to me—again, not the first time—how transparent the part is, how obvious I am, and that people see me as this—” She stops, holds out her hands. “But I couldn’t fill in the blank. I thought, Rebel? No. Agitator? Maybe. Each word felt so hollow. Because the part I see myself playing, Frankie, is truly subversive and uncompromising and stubborn and exacting, not just with my students, with everybody. But what if people really see me as a sappy old throwback, like Maud Benson, or a small-minded narcissist, like Lexus? What if this role I try so hard to cultivate, and reinforce in my work and my classes and my home life, such as it is—what if nobody’s buying it? Because we never get called on our bullshit, not in a serious way at least, not without the person apologizing afterward and saying, You know I didn’t mean that, and then we forget or dismiss it, even though it was real.”

“Well—” Frankie says, but she keeps talking.

“So I thought, Shouldn’t I know for sure how people see me, so I can change or adjust or something? And I realized—this was the traumatic part—I had no one I could trust to tell me the truth. Nobody without a stake in impressing me or telling me what I wanted to hear.
Th
en today I saw you in the department—you were in the doorway of the lounge with one of those yappy work-study kids—and I thought, I can trust Frankie, I always trusted Frankie. Frankie will tell me the truth so I can stop making a fool of myself.”

She’s not backsliding, he thinks; it’s punishment she’s after. He’s not quite ready to give her what she wants. Plus, he’s never been able to lie to her.

“You want honesty?”

“Yes.”

“
Th
e problem is,” he says, “I see you exactly the way you say you want to be seen. Subversive, exacting, brilliant, all that.
Th
at’s how I describe you to—well, I can’t talk about you with anyone, but that’s how I
would
describe you if I could.”

“
Th
at’s just you. What about everybody else? Your classmates, and Lexus, and Gadkari?” Out of nowhere she’s almost crying.

“I’d add one word to your self-description,” he says. “Selfish. Ungenerous. OK, two words.
Th
ey shouldn’t surprise you. But those aren’t exactly negatives, or inconsistent, in our field.”

“What about everybody else, Frankie?”

“Jesus, why do you care so much all of a sudden?”

“Just tell me.”

He thinks for a moment. He has her on the hook.
Th
is can go one way or the other. “Everybody else, too, then, as far as I know,” he says, which is true enough. “You’re not a fraud, Rhonda. I mean, everyone’s a fraud, but you’re less of a fraud than most.” She turns to look at him. “You did screw me over, though. Twice. You even broke my heart a little. Not just when you stood me up. Before then, a bunch of times.” He leans back, props himself up on his palms. “But hey, you could say that’s my own fault. Since I know how selfish and ungenerous you are, I should have seen it coming.”