The Madwoman Upstairs (2 page)

Twenty-eight Broad Street, the meeting point suggested by James Timothy Orville III, turned out to be an underground pub. Near the entryway were two pots of skeletal flowers and a life-size statue of Hereward the Wake, who was holding his own head on a stake. I walked through the second set of doors and stumbled directly into the bar, which jutted out of the side of the room like a bad tooth. There was a lone bartender, a wild-eyed redhead with lips the color of undercooked beef. She was drying dishes with a rag.

“Excuse me, is this The Three Little Pigs?” I asked.

She looked me over, unimpressed, and handed me a menu. The top read,
The Three Pigs’ Heads
, and I congratulated myself on arriving twenty seconds early. I noted a number of boozing patrons: a squawking couple guzzling Irish coffee, a woman who appeared to be counting her teeth with her tongue, and a double-chinned man with a barking, pterodactyl laugh. I searched the room for the withering old man with a well-trimmed gray mustache and a suitably gold monocle who could possibly have the name James Timothy Orville III.

My eyes alighted on a figure in the far corner of the room. He was sitting down, with one hand resting on the table in front of him, one in his lap. At first, I thought he was one of Hereward the Wake’s friends—stuffed, almost lifelike. But when I squinted and peered into his corner, I saw the slow rise and fall of his chest. I stared at him, and he stared at me, and as he stared at me his eyes narrowed, and as I stared at him I began to panic because it occurred to me that this non-old, non-gray, non-ugly man might be James Timothy Orville III.

There was a raucous burst of laughter from one of the nearby tables, where a woman with a big scream of a hat was pushing a Kleenex up her sleeve. My professor—God, was that really him?—watched as I crashed into a nearby table leg. He looked like a safari animal attempting to be incognito.

I stopped in front of him. There was a moment of silence. He had a noble, expansive forehead that made me want to write calligraphy on it. When I didn’t move, he said:

“Well? Have a seat.”

I dropped into a chair. He was young—couldn’t have been over thirty—and seemed tightly bound in his clean, pressed suit.

He said: “I am James Orville.”

I didn’t have a chance to respond because a gray-haired waiter emerged from behind us and paused in front of me. He seemed to be waiting for me to order, so I said, “Just a steamed milk, please.”

“A what?” he said. His eyes were vague and cloudy, and I had a feeling that the sixties may have been a blur for him.

“Steamed milk?” I repeated.

The waiter turned to my professor, whose gaze had not left mine. “Two fish and chips and a pint, Hugh,” he said.

Hugh left and the two of us sat in silence. Orville stared at me, and for the first time, I realized how difficult it is to stare at two eyes at the same time. I wondered how I had ever done it before. He reached into his briefcase and pulled out a slender blue file that he dropped on the table without looking at. His expression was impassive. Somewhere, I just knew, he must have a slew of illegitimate children, all named Bartholomew.

“Well,” he said, and he smiled—almost. “Tell me about yourself.”

I gave a nervous laugh. “No, thank you.”

“That wasn’t a question.”

“I’d rather not discuss me if that’s okay,” I said. “How are you?”

He blinked. I moved my left leg on top of my right, then back again. It seemed unfair that he should be so young, and that I should be even younger. He did not respond, and as a result, neither Orville nor I said anything for several moments.

“What would you like to know?” I asked, finally, even though I already knew. Orville, like Maggie the Mortician, would want to talk about my last name. He would want to discuss my father. He would want to discuss the fire, the estate, the legend. He would want to know what Emily Brontë ate for breakfast on the morning of December 5, what erotic poems Anne wrote in her spare time, what Charlotte secretly had tattooed on her bottom. It was my own personal curse, being related to the three most famous dead women in all of England.

I swallowed and said, at last, “I was born in Boston.”

His expression didn’t change. He had picked his acne as a kid; there was a small chain of scars above his right eye.

“I’m an only child,” I continued.

Silence.

I took a breath. “I went to a small boarding school in Vermont, which you probably haven’t heard of, because it really is very small, and I haven’t been to Europe much, unless you count Paris, because that’s where my ex-mother lives. Excuse me, ex-wife. I mean, my father’s ex-wife. My mom. I don’t get a chance to visit her much, because, like I said, I live in Vermont. I mean, Boston, but I said that already. I—”

“Miss Whipple,” interrupted Orville.

“Yes.”

“Can we get on with it?”

I said, “Pardon?”

“I am your tutor, not your therapist,” he said, somewhat bored. “Please take care to remember that in the future.”

I said, “Sorry.”

“Never apologize.”

“Sorry.”

“Tell me about your
academic
self,” he continued. “I would like to know what interests you, besides run-on sentences. Why did you come to Oxford?”

“Everyone’s got to be somewhere.”

“Is that supposed to be funny?”

“I don’t know, was it?”

I gave an awkward laugh, which fell flat. I envied people who could talk to important people like normal humans. I had never been particularly smooth. Orville’s face was expressionless in the pale light.

I said, “I came here to study English literature.”

“And why was that?”

“I like books.”

“You
like
books.”

“I’m good at reading?”

“I did not ask whether you are literate. I asked why you are studying English literature. What do you imagine it will provide you?”

“Unemployment?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Joke,” I said. “Joke.”

My cheeks were burning. Suddenly, he leaned forward across the table, resting his entire weight on his forearms. He looked like a surgeon who, in the midst of a routine operation to find someone’s soul, had discovered it just wasn’t there.

He was frowning. “What is the
purpose
of literature to you?”

He might have been asking me if I believed in God.

“English is the study of what makes us human,” I said. It was a phrase I had learned from standardized tests.

“Human biology is the study of what makes us human,” he said. “Try again.”

“English is the study of civilization.”

“History is the study of civilization,” he corrected.

“English is the study of art.”

“Art is the study of art.”

I let out a flush of air. “English tells us stories.”

“If you can’t think of anything intelligent to say, don’t say anything at all.”

I shut my mouth. Orville leaned back in his chair. The waiter named Hugh returned and dumped two plates in front of us. On each one was a fish that looked like it had died tragically by drowning in its own fat. The scent was something savage—salty and prehistoric, wrought from an age in which people still ate each other. Hugh shoved a pint of ale on the table in a final act of punctuation.

Orville unfolded his napkin in his lap. He had a strong chin and thin lips that cut across it in a straight line. Right now, they were pursed to the point of invisibility. He did not seem like the sort of person who would frequent dimly lit pubs before noon. The entire place reeked of ale and centuries of smutty assignations.

“Perhaps we can try going about this a different way,” he said. “What sort of authors do you admire?”

I said, “Name a few and I’ll tell you if I like them.”

He raised his eyebrows, and I wondered if I had been rude. He severed the head of his fish with one thwack of his fork.

“Milton,” he said. “Do you like John Milton.”

“No.”

“Chaucer?”

“No.”

“Thoreau?”

“Oh, please.”

There was a bit of a pause. Orville seemed to be considering whether I was, in fact, a criminal. He took a small, well-proportioned bite.

“T. S. Eliot?” he said. “Jane Austen?”

“No, and no-but-nice-try.”

“Coleridge, Keats, Wordsworth?”

“No, sort of, and no.”

He paused. “Brontë?”

I paused. I had been right. Orville did, in fact, want to discuss my relatives. How could he not? We stared at each other in a moment of mutual understanding. He knew who I was; I knew that he knew; he knew that I knew that he knew.

I crossed my arms in a way that felt childish even to me. “That depends. Which Brontë?”

“Charlotte.”

“Hah.”

“Is that a no?”

I didn’t respond. The name Brontë had, predictably, changed everything. He was still frowning, but it was now a curious frown. From across the room, the man with the pterodactyl laugh let rip another roar.

“Can you appreciate no authors?” Orville asked.

“I appreciate them,” I said. “I just don’t like them.”

“Why?”

“Personal reasons.”

“Which are?”

“I thought you weren’t my therapist.”

Orville placed his napkin back on the table. He almost smiled. Almost. The trajectory of the academic year was now spanning out in front of me, and it looked like one blackened stream of intellectual dictatorship. The more time Orville and I spent together, the more I would become one of those pale-faced vampire children in films who emerge only to say something unsettlingly prophetic in a half whisper.

“Won’t you tell me a little about yourself now?” I asked.

He raised an eyebrow again. I half hoped he would say nothing, or snap at me. But to my surprise, he became quite friendly.

“What would you like to know?” he said. “I was born in London to two academics, matriculated at Cambridge when I was fifteen, graduated when I was eighteen, earned a graduate degree in the States, and for the past eight years have been a fellow at Old College, where my research focuses on the structural and grammatical integrity of texts, and contends that a perfect novel is proof of authorial invisibility.”

I said, “That sounds riveting.”

“I dislike still water and raw fish, never exercise except in the early morning, and find
A Separate Peace
to be one of the most singularly moving works of the twentieth century.”

I nodded. I had a feeling that he had given this autobiography many times before, and to many students. I wondered how many he had taught, exactly, and how many of them had at some point been undone by his hellish beauty.

“You attended Cambridge at fifteen?” I clarified.

“Yes.”

“What—you couldn’t get in any earlier?”

He took another bite of fish. “Why don’t you tell me what you hope to study this year.”

I answered, “Postmodernism.”

“That is a very small swath of literature.”

“With a great overall concept: books don’t have answers because life has no meaning.”

His eyes flicked from one side of my face to the other, as though he were skimming an empty book.

I continued, “For example, have you ever read
White Noise
? It’s—”

“Yes, I’ve read it.”

“Sorry.”

“Stop apologizing,” he said. “Do you honestly believe that life has no meaning?”

I said, “Is that a problem?”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty.”

A small silence. He leaned forward; instinctively, I leaned back. I thought he was about to question why a first-year was twenty years old instead of eighteen, but all he said was:

“I imagine you think you are very complicated.”

“Meh.”

“Excuse me?”

I didn’t respond.

“You have misread
White Noise
—and, I wager, all of postmodernism,” he said, dabbing his mouth once with his napkin. “What appears to be a lack of meaning is in fact an example of authorial craft. DeLillo illustrates the inability to communicate through a
medium
of communication; he asserts that the world is too complex to understand in language that is unusually
simple.
He demonstrates significance precisely through a
lack
of overt significance. I imagine you cannot find its ‘meaning’ because you lack the passion to try.”

Passion.
There it was, my least favorite word. It was the elusive—yes, meaningless—term people used when they wanted to believe they were more human than other humans.

The lamp nearby sputtered, leaving Orville’s face shrouded in a half light. I was silent. He reached for the blue file in front of us—my application?—and flipped through it like it was one of those picture books that tells a story if you run through the pages fast enough.

“Our meeting times will be on Thursday, from half eight to half nine in the morning,” he said. “By next week, you will have read the
Old College Book of Disciplinary Procedures
, which you will find in the post in a few days. You will also have prepared an analysis of Robert Browning’s ‘Porphyria’s Lover.’ The highest mark any late assignment will receive is fifty percent. If you do not complete the reading, do not bother coming to see me.”

I nodded. “Sir?”

“What.”

“Browning was not a postmodernist.”

“I never said he was.”

He tossed me my academic file and told me to have a nice day.

CHAPTER 2

M
y father and I had only discussed my inheritance once. I remember it well. I was fourteen. My mother had walked out on us a year earlier, and the only other woman in my life was Rebecca, my math tutor, who came on Wednesdays and Sundays. This particular Thursday, my father and I were sitting in the Heights. That’s what he called his library, which he had modeled after Heathcliff’s bedroom in
Wuthering Heights
. It was his personal sanctuary, and as such, it was filled with mountains of crap: excess gravy boats, turtleneck sweaters, spare copies of
The Republic
, and a Hemingway voodoo doll. Hanging from the one visible window ledge was a collection of upside-down dried roses. Dad said that each one represented one of his early rejection letters from major publishing houses. To me, they just looked like unlucky parachuters.