Slow Waltz in Cedar Bend (7 page)

“Sorry I haven’t been by to say hello. I’ve been getting ready for my final exams, and Jim said he told you about the London
trip. God, what a mess, finding a house sitter on short notice, getting bills paid and things set up at the bank. I’ve been
running for days with no letup. What are you going to do over the holidays? Any big plans?”

“No, not much at all. It’s too damn cold to crank up the bike and ride it someplace. I’ll probably try to finish the paper
I’m doing on comparing complex structures so I can present it at the fall meetings. Get my trimonthly haircut, spend a few
days with my mother out in Custer over Christmas. Other than that, watch the snow fall, I guess, and listen to the Miles Davis
tapes I ordered while I spruce up my lectures for the class I’ll be covering for Jim. My notes in that area are a little yellowed.
It’ll go by pretty fast, it always does.” He wanted to say he’d be thinking about her every other minute, but he didn’t.

“Sounds pretty low key. No special Christmas wishes?”

He looked at the ceiling for a moment, struggling, trying to pull himself up and out of a self-indulgent funk. Michael had
wishes all right, but nothing he could talk about. He recovered and leaned back in his chair, fingers locked behind his head,
forcing a little grin. “Well, sometime I’d like a leather belt with
Orville
tooled on the back. Used to be a guy in Custer had one, and I thought it was pretty neat when I was a kid.”

Jellie grinned back. “Only you, Michael, of all the people I know, would say something like that. God, it’s almost surreal.”

“Well, life is surreal, Jellie. Except for Orville. He didn’t dwell on those things, just drove his grain truck and whistled
a lot.”

“I think Orville had it all worked out. I’d like to hear more about him, but I’ve got to run. I’ll try to stop in before we
leave. Take care, Michael, and say hello to Orville if you see him. Ask if he’ll write a self-help book for the rest of the
world.”

He watched her jeans as she left and walked down the hall, then got to his feet and went to the door so he could watch her
a little while longer. She looked back once, as if she knew he’d be standing there and fluttered her hand in a final wave
as she turned the corner, heading for the office of solid, steady James Braden.

Michael ran into her the following week in a small shopping area near the campus. They had coffee at Beano’s, sitting in a
back booth in midafternoon. Her exams were over and preparations for London were well along, so she was a little calmer and
seemed in no hurry this time. She was wearing one of her standard winter outfits: jeans, long-sleeved undershirt beneath a
flannel shirt, down vest.

He leaned against the wall, one foot on the seat of the booth, and glanced at all the old posters of campus events plastered
on the walls. The undergraduates—those who were finished with exams and some who weren’t—were drinking beer. Two men, gay
activists from the philosophy department, were playing chess at a table next to them.

Jellie asked if he had any suggestions for London restaurants. He told her, except for a day here and there on his way through,
his experience with London was mostly limited to making connections at Heathrow and he didn’t know the city well. Michael’s
tastes ran to societies less well organized than those in the West, and most of his traveling had been in southeast Asia.
He didn’t mention the women in Bangkok with their long hair and compliant ways. He glanced at his watch and said he had to
give his last final examination in twenty-two minutes, starting to make departure motions.

“Michael, I’ll miss our talks over coffee, and I’ll miss
you,
truly I will.”

He looked at her for a long while. For the first time he really didn’t care what she or anyone else thought about him looking
at her in a certain way.

She took a deep breath and started to say something, then paused for a moment before continuing, as if she were trying to
decide whether or not to speak at all. “I don’t want to get deeply into this now, but…” She hesitated.

His hands were shaking for reasons he wasn’t sure of, and he held them under the table where she couldn’t see them. He could
feel a small tic in a cheek muscle, just below his left eye. In the spaces of a man’s life there are moments when things shift
into some other gear. He sensed that was happening now.

“What are you talking about, Jellie? What don’t you want to get into?”

“What I’m trying to say… is that… that I’m not going to just miss you. I’m going to
miss
you. I know more than you may think I know about how you feel about some things… how I feel… Oh, good God, I’m making a
muddle of this.…”

He got his hands quieted down and reached for one of hers. She put it out to meet him halfway. He laid his other hand on the
little bundle forming on the table. “C’mon, Jellie, say what you’ve got to say. I want to hear it, whatever it is.”

“Michael, it all sounds a little presumptuous, what I’m trying to get across. If I’m wrong, please forget I ever said it.
Promise?”

“I promise.”

She added her other hand to the stack on the table and stared at them, cleared her throat. “Behind all the laughter and light
talk we share with each other, there’s something else going on, isn’t there?”

He stayed quiet, looked at her. She had the stage, and he wasn’t about to climb up on it right at the moment. He wanted her
to finish what she had to say, to let it run wherever it was going. Good or bad, it was time for that. A waitress going into
the kitchen dropped a stack of dishes, and every head in Beano’s, except two, turned to see the disaster. He could see the
second hand on his watch going by. Fifteen minutes until his examination on the other side of campus.

“Damnit… isn’t there? There’s something else going on between us, isn’t there?” She squeezed his hands in both of hers and
rapped them lightly on the table.

He nodded.

“It’s been there since we first met at the dean’s reception in late August, hasn’t it?”

He nodded again and talked straight: “You walked through the door and something started to hum inside me. The hum has now
escalated into a symphonic scream I can’t turn off.”

“Oh, Michael… Michael.” She looked away from him, at the wall, then at the ceiling. Twelve minutes to exam time. He didn’t
move. The last fly of a summer past, surviving on the largesse of Beano’s, landed on his coffee cup and walked an endless
path around the rim.

“My mother saw it at Thanksgiving, something about the way you were looking at me, and I guess the way I looked back. No,
that’s not being honest enough—I was looking back at you the way you were looking at me. When we were doing dishes in the
kitchen, she mentioned it to me and said, ‘Be careful, Jellie, be
very
careful.’

Two forty-seven. Beano’s was clearing out as about half the crowd hustled off to the three o’clock exams. “Michael, maybe
this will all settle down while I’m gone. It just has to, doesn’t it?”

He said nothing, shrugging his shoulders, smiling at her.

She stood, pulling on her parka and mumbling, “I feel like a schoolgirl.” She looked down at him. “I’m glad I said what I
said, Michael. And I’m glad you said what you said and for the way you’ve handled it the past few months. You like to think
you’re a little rough around the edges, but you’re actually pretty smooth. You’re a damn fine man, Michael Till-man, attractive
and kind and everything else—isn’t there a woman out there somewhere for you? I mean someone other than…” She left off the
me
— couldn’t bring herself to say it, though he wished she had said it—and let her voice circle down to nothing.

“I understand what you mean. Who knows? All I know now is how I feel about you.” He picked up his coat and started sliding
out of the booth, disoriented, thinking the distance to next August could only be measured in light-years.

She bent over and kissed him on the cheek. “Ride easy. I’ll send you a card.” And she was gone then, working her way through
the tables and out the front door of Beano’s.

He left two bucks on the table and began an easy run through the campus, feet on the sidewalk, mind and heart somewhere else.
Across the creek, along the duck pond, and only one minute late into a room where he would ask of students what they knew.

T
he Bradens lifted off for England on December 20, the day Michael finished grading final exams. Depression over Jellie’s leaving
was momentarily lightened by several strong performances in both the decision-making and quantitative methods courses. He
expected good work from the graduate students, but the undergraduates overcame their senior blues and rose to the task, surprising
and pleasing him.

The old Shadow crouched in the living room, waiting for the turn of wrenches and better weather. Michael stacked exam papers
on its seat and cranked up the computer, which shared the desk with greasy tools and unwashed coffee cups. A few taps on the
keys and the GradeCalc program came up. In went the scores, GradeCalc churned away for thirty seconds, and out came final
distributions, normal curves, standard deviations, and all that other good stuff, most of which he ignored in his grading.

Two hours later, the final grade sheets with one whole cover page of instructions that would make a computer blink—instructions
he didn’t read and hadn’t read for all fifteen years of teaching and apparently didn’t need to read since nobody ever complained—were
filled in and signed. He had twenty minutes to drop off the grades before the registrar shut down at four-thirty. Coat on,
over to the campus, turn in the grades.

Done. Free, for a month. Fifteen years of doing this, another twenty to go unless the dean could prove professional incompetence,
which he couldn’t, or charged Michael with moral turpitude, which he wouldn’t, because the entire university except for the
accounting department would be out on its ear if those standards were enforced. Stay away from the coeds in your classes—that
was the main rule for survival, put down with no punches pulled by the former dean, an old guy who had hired Michael fresh
out of graduate school. Way before sexual harassment started flashing in the front of everyone’s mind, the old dean had a
famous lecture he gave to young faculty members, the males, that is. The essence of it went something like this:

Gentlemen, I know you’re all adults, but let me remind you about a few matters. A lot of these young women are traditional mid-western girls, and they expect to take you home to meet Mother and Father on the weekend following bedroom activity, with
wedding announcements to be mailed soon after. Forget about the air of sophistication they seem to exude. The coeds are big
trouble, I mean
big
trouble. The undergraduate males are a bunch of donkeys, mostly, and you’re going to look sleek and worldly to the coeds,
and they’re going to look pretty good to you. Some of them will sit in the front row in short skirts with paradise twinkling
at you. You’ll have plenty of opportunities for good times between the sheets— it’s a goddamn cafeteria out there—but forget
it, at least until they’re no longer in any of your classes, and I would strongly recommend you stay away from them altogether.
I have problems enough without sobbing young women sitting in my office and claiming you discriminated against them in your
grading because of some kind of confusion involving preconjugal folderol. In other words, cause me that kind of grief and
I’ll kick your butts down the academic mountain and see you never work in this business again.

It was a lecture on how to avoid trouble, not develop sensitivity toward females. Michael was sure the latter issue never
crossed the old dean’s mind, given the faculty was 99 percent male.

Having said that much, the dean told them the famous story that had been part of the university saga for twenty-five years.
Seems one of the Russian teachers was in his office when a coed came in to see him. He motioned for her to sit down and said
he’d be with her in a moment, all the while intently finishing some piece of work he had on his desk. When he looked up, she
was standing there in the buff with the office door shut. The issues were a little complicated, but the nub of it was this:
Give me a passing grade or I’ll scream.

You want cool under pressure? You want big
cojones?
The professor of Russian had them both, in spades. He could have been a neurosurgeon or a space commando. He got up, threw
open the door, and walked forthwith into the hall, where he pointed in at the young woman and shouted in heavily accented
English, “Get out of my office. Now!” Passersby were treated to a reasonably decent glimpse of a reasonably good, young female
body (that’s part of the saga, anyway, though Michael noticed that as the story was carried forward and repeated, her physical
attributes approached Amazonian proportions, her body filling out and improving with age, as it were).

He’d always wondered just what lesson should be drawn from the tale, since it never had been clear whether or not the young
woman and the Russian had anything going on the side. But, having told it, the dean shooed the junior faculty out of his office
and left them with the following two guidelines for not letting their moral turpitude drift: Keep your pants zipped and your
office door open.

About two-thirds of those receiving the lecture followed the dean’s advice. The other one-third cut a swath like a combine
through the waving fields of coed grain and apparently suffered little for it, partly because those peering out from glass
houses have no interest in chucking accusatory rocks at others. Michael left the coeds alone, simply because he didn’t find
them attractive. Too young, too naive, and what the hell do you say to them in the morning? “Who do you have for Western civ?”
C’mon.

So the grades were in, and Michael was unfettered until January 17, when he’d do it all over again. Down the halls of the
administration building he went, admiring the waxed oak floors, inhaling the vapors of incompetent power radiating from the
walls and oozing from under darkened doors like smoke from a burning village where truth and beauty had once been found. The
temporary lightness he’d felt after finishing a good set of exams was dissipating as he thought about Jellie Braden. He was
getting angry at her for going to England, for just bloody taking off and leaving him there to mourn her absence.