The Madwoman Upstairs (39 page)

“What kind of wells are around here, if you had to guess?”

Orville exhaled and checked the clock again. “Go back to sleep, Samantha.”

“No. I’m finally seeing things clearly.”

“It doesn’t sound like it.” He rested his head on his pillow and closed his eyes. I poked him one more time but he didn’t react. That’s when I put my hand on his cheek.

Orville’s eyes flew open. I blinked at my own nerve. My fingertips were cold and his face felt velvety. I had broken a barrier. I could almost hear the cymbals crashing; I could picture the portraits in the dining hall waking up with a start and screaming at each other to sound the alarm—
Be quick about it, man, awaken the troops!
But Orville did not move away. He just lay there with an immobile stare, a frown on his face. His chest rose and fell slowly. It grew very quiet. My life, I knew, was about to change.

Orville said, very clearly, “What are you doing.”

But before he could say anything else, I pushed my face into his in a kiss that I hoped he would someday understand to be the surprising yet inevitable end to our torturous, imaginary courtship. I kissed him, and it was strong, and I wished I could say my blood was roaring, but really it was my ears that were roaring—maybe it was the voices of all those academics in their portraits screaming at me to knock it off, or debating all the heteronormative gender nonconformity issues that I was raising, and after all, had I thought this through? Or was I overthinking this? Gosh, both seemed likely, didn’t they? Time seemed to slow down, and what I felt was heat and sweat, but really they were both just coming from me, not him. In that moment, all I could think of was why the world’s most basic task carried with it so many academic violations, and all the seriousness of a terrible crime.

I was about to call the whole thing off, when suddenly—and to my great surprise—Orville lurched forward. I squeaked, or was that the bed? His hand cupped the back of my neck—hard—and his face found mine, again and again. I felt a surge of helplessness, the kind I imagined people nearly died from. And yet I couldn’t understand whether he was pulling me toward him or trying to thrust me off of him. I panicked with the weight of both options, and before either became clear to me, I did the only sensible thing I could: I threw his head back on the pillow—it landed with a thump—and I fled the room, like an airborne ballerina who’s finally gone soaring wildly out of control.

CHAPTER 15

Dear Sir John,

This is Samantha. I snuck out of the house at 5:30 a.m. this morning, but I wanted to thank you for your hospitality, especially since you hated my father so much, and you dislike me too because I look so much like him and you think I am dating your son. (I am not dating your son; that would be gross.) I know you didn’t know my father very well, but he was actually not a very bad man, and sometimes he could be a very good man. He did things that I don’t understand, but if it makes you feel better, I don’t think he did, either. I’m sorry if this handwriting is slanted and illegible; I have not slept in about a year. I am leaving my professor a note, too—would you see that he gets it?

All the best,

Samantha J. Whipple

It was almost eight thirty at night by the time I made it back to Oxford. The Haworth train was out of commission due to a broken rail, which meant the only option available to me was an obscure bus line. The storm had ended, but it was still an apocalyptic eighteen-hour ride, thanks to storm-chewed roads and piles of slush, which spat out from under our wheels like chopped salad. The time did not do good things to my mind. With horrific accuracy, I replayed the last twenty-four hours. I realized that my life of late had consisted of far too much dialogue and not enough exposition. I imagined an angry, bespectacled English teacher slashing his pen through the transcript of my life, wondering how someone could possibly say so much and think so little.

When I returned to campus, I dropped my bags in my room and then went straight to the Faculty Wing. Rebecca’s door was slightly ajar, and so was her mouth. I must have looked like hell.

“Hello,” I said.

She didn’t answer immediately. Her expression told me that I better have a damn good reason for being here.

“That stench,” she said. “It’s primordial.”

“Yes, I’m sorry. Never take the bus.”

“Where are you coming from?”

“The First Circle of Hell.”

She looked at me blankly.

I said, “That’s the one filled with all the unbaptized pagans.”

No response.

I clarified, “ ‘Abandon hope, all ye who enter here’?”

Silence. We had nothing in common. I took a seat without being asked. The room was cold, and in the distance, I heard odd gurgling noises that sounded similar to several bodily functions. I tried to make myself comfortable, but I was wearing a scratchy wool coat and yoga pants that were too tight. I had only worn yoga pants once before, and it turned out the tabloids were wrong. They did not look good on everyone.

Rebecca looked suspicious, so I explained: “I was in Haworth.”

“What were you doing in Haworth?”

“Visiting the Brontë Parsonage.”

“I see,” she said. Her voice was pinched. The only thing on her desk, I noticed, was a hammer. “James Orville was also there this weekend.”

The mention of his name brought a blush to my cheeks. “Oh? Was he?”

“Did you know he would be there?” asked Rebecca.

“Pardon?”

“That is—were you there together?”

“Is that a pot of coffee?”

“You’re blushing.”

She didn’t offer me any coffee. Instead, she took a seat behind her desk and smoothed her palms over her trousers. She seemed to be remembering something unpleasant. I recalled her telling me that she and my father used to take romantic trips up north for the weekend. It was all part of their tragic love story. An unfair twist of fate, perhaps, that my story did not seem to be playing out quite as tragically.

“I wanted to ask you something,” I said. I tried to sound suave, but the effort of feigning comfort produced a larger discomfort than I was expecting. “Was Halford’s Well named after my father?”

Her face barely moved. “I see you figured that out.”

“Yes. He was your student.”

“He was my student.”

“Of mathematics.”

“He knew how to read and write already. He believed education should be a challenge.”

“I see. Someone once told me that people store their stuff in Halford’s Well,” I said. “Is that true?”

“It is Oxford’s oldest wishing well,” she said, impatient. “People have been throwing pennies in it for hundreds of years. Anything else you’d like to know?”

“Did people throw in anything besides pennies? Like, objects?”

“One throws one’s wishes, not one’s belongings.”

I thought about it. “What if I wanted to go take a dip there tonight? Is it deep?”

Rebecca’s “I’m not amused” stare was eerily like my mother’s. Her expression told me that last night she had been dining with Keats and discussing poetry; now look what sort of uneducated ruffian she was with.

She repeated: “Take a dip?”

“Did my dad ever do that?”

“No sane person would swim in there.”

“Exactly.”

Rebecca did not want to pursue such a jejune conversation, it seemed, because she began packing up her things. A stack of ungraded papers from her drawer made it into her purse, and then came lipstick and earrings—things she carried around but apparently never used.

I walked to her desk, cautious. She looked tired. I thought about opening up to her completely, telling her what I felt and how I felt it, if not out of camaraderie, then because vulnerability was a currency and could be used the way some people used down payments. My breath quickened.

“I don’t think you did anything wrong,” I said. “With my father, that is. It was just unfortunate that people reacted the way they did.”

She didn’t respond.

“Love for a professor is not inherently pathological,” I continued. “I think it has the right to be nurtured, just like anything else.”

She gave me a cold, provisional smile. “And what, pray tell, has suddenly fashioned this new opinion?”

I took a breath. “You were right. I’m in love with James Orville.”

The smile did not leave her face. She looked triumphant, for a brief moment.

“Then I hope you are prepared to ruin his life,” she said.

“Pardon?”

“You think that you can eliminate the power differential between you two. You will not eliminate it. You will reinforce it. When a student loves a teacher, it is childish, natural, almost sweet. When a teacher loves a student, it is unnatural, a disease. He becomes a label. Predator. Manipulator. Monster.”

“I am only trying to treat him as a human being.”

“And by doing so, you will dehumanize him.”

“Are you saying you regret being with my father, then? I thought you said you were over the whole thing.”

She snapped her purse shut. “It’s time for you to go, Samantha.”

“No—please,” I said, and my voice cracked in spite of me. I felt so lonesome, just then, that all I wanted was to be low-level friends, so we didn’t have to keep staring at each other like this. Being vindictive took too much effort. Besides, the two of us should have been allies, not enemies—we were the only two people left who ever really understood my father. Rebecca must have noted the change in my voice, because her eyes narrowed.

I asked, again, “Do you regret it? Please tell me. I think you were treated very unfairly by the media.”

She looked me over once, as if trying to decide if I was worth her time. “Have you ever been in love, Sam? Proper, reciprocated love?”

“No.”

“It took me thirty-five years to find it,” she said. “At that point, love is not love, but the end of isolation. You find that you do, in fact, belong—if not to a person, then to the rest of humanity, to silly novels and famous tunes. Tell me, if you can, that it’s not part of the reason you love Orville.”

I didn’t respond. A slow, unfriendly smile came over her face.

“You and I are more alike than you think,” she said. “On some level, you know this. I saw myself in you even when you were a spoiled child: alone and friendless, loved by only one person, but loved so strongly that it felt like the love of the entire world. My own father ran off with a family friend when I was young, and my mother moved to Guam. I found my therapy in math, just as you seem to have found yours in literature—two disciplines that help make sense of the world. I know what you want, Samantha, because it’s the same thing I wanted. You want a reason to believe that there is something out there larger than yourself, something that makes all the petty things you’ve been through seem irrelevant. That’s how love works. Do I regret falling in love with your father? Regret is made obsolete by the story you tell.”

She leaned back in her seat. I wasn’t expecting sentimentality, but there it was. She sounded strangely honest, like a real live human being. Her eyes were glassy and I wondered how many feelings she had bottled up behind them, and whether those feelings were organized in a Fibonacci sequence. It was my mistake, I suppose, to think that someone had to be all bad or not bad at all.

“Did you two stay together, even after you both left Old College?” I asked.

“Your father left England. For years we kept in touch through letters,” she said. “They weren’t beautiful or effusive, but you come to remember them as beautiful and effusive. Years went by, with him going and coming from England at will. At some point, he wrote me and let me know that a woman named Alice was pregnant, and he was going to marry her. Soon, I began hearing about you. You filled pages. You could have been your own epic. Every time he came to visit me, he would tell me how quickly you learned to read, how much you ate, how you jumped into the laundry hamper when you played hide-and-seek.
She’ll be tall, Becky, she’ll be a giant.
You were your father’s best story.”

She did not sound nostalgic, nor did she appear to be recalling a pleasant memory. Her face was sour, her eyes exacting. At the mention of “tall,” my mother’s face popped into my mind.

“You pursued an affair, knowing it would break up a family,” I said.

“Your father did the same,” she snapped. “Where is his blame?”

I said, “Did either of you ever think of my mom?”

To my surprise, Rebecca let out a cruel laugh. “Your mother didn’t know your father, not the way I did. She married the father of her baby; he married the mother of his.”

Rebecca’s laugh was high-pitched. My mouth tensed into a small line.

I said, “And yet Dad broke up with you anyway.”

I shouldn’t have said it, of course, but the damage was done. Our temporary alliance was over. Rebecca gave me a good, long stare—the kind that could ruin you if you weren’t careful. With one, deliberate motion, she took the square black glasses off her nose and placed them flat on her desk.