The Thorn and the Blossom: A Two-Sided Love Story (7 page)

“Are you all right, Dr. Thorne?” asked the nurse.

“Yes, I’m fine,” he said, turning to go. “I’ll be back on Thursday.” But when he got back to his office at Bartlett, Michael Fitch, the department chair, told him there was a candidate interviewing on Thursday. An Evelyn Morgan.

“I’d particularly like you to be there, Brendan,” he said. “Her doctoral dissertation is on the Green Man legend in Europe, and you’re our resident expert. We need her, of course. School starts in a month, and we don’t have anyone to teach Randolph’s classes. But I want to make sure her research is, you know, what we would want in an associate professor. Here’s a copy of her CV.”

Evelyn Morgan. Could it be her? B.A. from Harvard, with a semester at Oxford. Ph.D. from Columbia. It had to be. And in her list of publications—it couldn’t be, but it was:
Green Thoughts
. She had run away from him, but still she’d written a poem about
The Tale of the Green Knight
.

H
e arrived late for her presentation. He’d read the article she had included as a sample of her scholarship. It was good—very good, in fact. He knew she’d spent the morning interviewing with Michael and several of the other professors. He would have been one of them if he hadn’t been teaching a summer course to pay Isabel’s hospital bills. Evelyn was probably relieved that only her presentation was left.

He entered the room as quietly as possible and sat in the back.

She recognized him. He could tell because, for a moment, she paused. A long moment, and he waited, holding his breath, worried that she had lost her place because of him. But no, she went on. “Any more questions?”

“Dr. Morgan, I realize this is beyond the scope of your study, but are you claiming that the Green Man and the Magical Woman originated in pre-Christian fertility rituals? And do you have any evidence for this hypothesis?”

“The texts themselves support such a hypothesis. The Green Man is clearly an embodiment of the changing seasons. In
The Tale of the Green Knight
, for example, Gawan’s armor is made of green metal shaped like leaves. The Magical Woman—in this case, Elowen—is most likely what remains of an ancient fertility goddess, a goddess of life and death. But the same pattern is found in
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
. Of course, it would take me another dissertation to explore all the permutations of this particular theory.”

There was polite laughter. More questions that she answered clearly and, he thought, cleverly. She had changed in the years since he’d last seen her. She seemed confident in her work—confident in herself. But beneath her gray suit, she still looked the same: the auburn hair, now pulled back with a barrette, and the straight,
slender figure that had climbed up the hill to Gawan’s Court.

“Well, I think Dr. Morgan would probably like some lunch,” said Michael. And then she was shaking hands and being escorted out the door, and Brendan was afraid he wouldn’t have a chance to see her before she left.

He waited in the faculty parking lot. She had probably driven from Richmond, so it was safe to assume that the only compact car in the lot was her rental.

She didn’t notice him until she was almost at the car door.

“Evelyn Morgan,” he said. “You know you’re going to get this position, don’t you?” He’d heard that from Michael himself, so he felt confident telling her.

She looked at him as though not knowing what to say. It had never occurred to him that she would be embarrassed, yet that was exactly what she seemed to be.

“I know,” he said. “It’s been a long time. More than ten years since I met you in Clews, I’m thinking. Shall we start over?” He held out his hand. “Nice to meet you, Dr. Morgan. I’m Brendan Thorne.”

He was relieved when she laughed and shook his hand. “It’s nice to meet you, Dr. Thorne.”

And then he had to explain about Oxford. That was embarrassing, but she didn’t seem to mind. Actually, she seemed glad. Which made him ask, rather boldly he thought, “Listen, assuming you get this position, which you will, can I take you out to dinner to celebrate?”

“Um, sure,” she said. And smiled. It was the same smile he remembered, the same freckles across her nose. Standing close to her, he could see that she looked older. She had lines around her eyes that hadn’t been there in Cornwall. They made her look—not
less beautiful, but more kind.

“Terrific,” he said. “I’ll see you in September.” He held the door open as she got into her car and then closed it behind her. September was a month away, but he’d waited ten years to see her again. He could wait another month.

E
ven when he knew she had moved into the small white house at Carter’s Corner, he didn’t go visit. Even when he knew she had started teaching, he didn’t stop by her office. Not for a week. Every morning, he looked at himself in the mirror and asked what he should do. He had to tell her about Isabel, but how should he do it?
Listen, I’m married, but my wife’s been functionally dead for three years. Three years ago, the doctor wanted me to disconnect the machines, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. She’d been so alive; I couldn’t be the one who let her die. Do you still want to have dinner with me, Evelyn?

Telling her would assume too much about the dinner, would assume she had a romantic interest in him. He wasn’t at all sure of that. If that interest ever developed—well, he would tell her then.

“You’re a coward, Brendan Thorne,” he told himself in the mirror. But he still remembered her screaming in the forest, running away from him. He had just met her again, and although it had been years since they had seen each other, he knew he didn’t want to lose her.

Finally, he found his copy of
Green Thoughts
and went to her office during office hours. This early in the year, no students would be there, and he wanted to find her alone.

She was already grading papers. “Dr. Morgan, I presume?” he said. “I believe I invited you to dinner.”

“You did,” she said, smiling. He would drive her to Richmond,
take her to a proper restaurant. Get to know her again. He wanted, very much, to know her again.

“And, by the way, would you do me the honor of signing my copy of
Green Thoughts
? I had no idea you’d written this, E. R. Morgan. Every third poet is named Morgan in Cornwall. I bought it when it was first published. It’s been sitting on my bookshelf for years.”

She signed the book, and he asked her about classes. They were going well; she was adjusting to life in a small town. The students were different, of course. Less cosmopolitan, more likely to be the first in their families to go to college. But she’d been assigned a poetry class to teach, and she was enjoying that.

“I did get a poem on plumbing yesterday!” she said. “It rhymed, too. But what I wanted to say is, I’m going to try writing poetry again, myself.”

“That’s terrific!” he replied. “You know, I think you have a rare and genuine talent. I wish I had your ear for rhythm. It would have helped me with my translation of
The Tale of the Green Knight
.”

“Your translation?” She looked puzzled.

“The one nobody heard about. You know what Oxford University Press told me? There wasn’t enough scholarly interest in such an obscure Cornish poem. Three years later, they published the translation by Thomas Holbrook.” Who was an idiot, and whose interpretations were sometimes ridiculously inaccurate. He grimaced. “Well, at least my translation got me out of graduate school. And into Bartlett.”

It still bothered him that his translation had been superseded. That scholars like Evelyn used Holbrook in their research. But that was all right, he thought later, walking across campus.
They’d set a date for dinner, and when he looked inside his copy of
Green Thoughts
he saw that the inscription said:
To Brendan, with love. Evelyn
.

I
t was another two weeks before they found the time to drive to Richmond for a real date. In the meantime, they had lunch together, walked around campus together. He was starting to wonder if she thought of him as anything more than a friend. But he was too nervous to ask—or to take her in his arms and kiss her, although each time he saw her, he thought about what it would be like. And then he remembered her screaming and running away.

They had an early dinner at a restaurant in Richmond. He’d been worried that the conversation might be awkward, but they talked as though they had known each other for years. He told her about his father’s death and selling the bookstore.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “That must have been difficult. You know, I tried to send you a letter there once. I guess it never reached you. Maybe it was after your father died.”

“It must have been,” he said. “I would certainly have written back to you, Evelyn.”

“Then you weren’t angry?” she asked. How beautiful she looked in the flickering candlelight. He was reminded once again of how he had once thought of her: Queen Elowen, by John William Waterhouse.

“I could never be angry with you,” he said, taking her hand across the table.

Afterward, they drove to the Museum of Fine Arts. In the gift shop, he saw a notebook with Waterhouse’s
The Lady of Shalott
reproduced on the cover. It reminded him so much of her—the
same auburn hair, the same line of cheek and jaw—that he bought it for her, despite the depressing subject matter. “For your poetry,” he said. “Just don’t pay attention to any curses, all right?”

“ ‘The curse is come upon me, cried the Lady of Shalott,’ ” she said. “I don’t think anyone hates me enough to curse me. Unless it’s the student I might have to flunk this semester!”

Afterward, he walked her up to her porch. “Evelyn,” he said, “is it safe to kiss you? I’ve been holding off, you know. Worried you would run away again.”

“I’m not going to run away,” she said. “I promise.”

“All right.” He put his hand on her cheek, leaned down, put his lips on hers. Tentatively at first, waiting for her to draw back. But she didn’t draw back.

Instead, she said, “Do you want to come in?”

This was the moment. He had to tell her about Isabel. He should have told her earlier, at dinner, during one of those pauses that happen in even the best conversations. But he had not.

She was looking up at him, waiting for an answer. They hadn’t turned on the porch light, and her eyes were dark, like the sea. He wanted to drown in them.

“Yes, I want to come in. Most definitely.”

She turned and opened the door. He followed her up the narrow stairs to the bedroom. There, he kissed her again, neck, shoulders, unbuttoning the blouse he’d imagined unbuttoning all through dinner, tossing it on the floor. Since Isabel’s accident, there had been no one, and he wondered if he would remember how to unhook a bra, how to make a woman cry out with pleasure. But his fingers remembered, traveled along the curves of her body as though it were a landscape he had known all his life. He kissed
her breasts, her stomach, listened to her moan and whisper, “Yes, there.” And when he entered her, it was like going home, like going where he should have been all along.

Afterward, she slept with her arms around him, curled against his back. He lay awake in the darkness, thinking about his life, about the two women he had loved. Isabel, fiery and opinionated. So very much alive, until the accident. He’d loved her even when they had disagreed, which had been more often than he liked to remember. He had mourned her loss for a long time. But lately, he’d felt that grief loosening, as though a rope tied around his heart had slipped its knot. And now here was Evelyn, intelligent, poetic, elusive. He didn’t think they would ever have his and Isabel’s epic quarrels. She would be more likely to keep her opinions to herself, avoid disagreeing with him. He would have to make sure she stood up for herself; he knew how overbearing he could be at times. But he could see them together, years from now, growing old: teaching, writing, pottering around the garden. It would be a good life.

When he finally fell asleep, he dreamed of Gawan’s Court. The clouds were dark overhead, and he could feel a cold wind pulling at his clothes. A woman stood there, auburn hair streaming in the wind, her white robes lifted and tossed. She was holding her arms out to him. Her mouth was open, she was saying something, but he couldn’t hear, the wind was too loud. Lightning crashed out of the sky, hit one of the standing stones. He raised his arms as though they could protect him and stumbled back. And then the rain fell, a driving gray rain, soaking him in an instant. He looked around—where was she? All he saw were the standing stones, the sea in the distance. The woman was gone.

“E
velyn, are you done for the day?”

For the past month, they had been a couple, although he hadn’t yet told Michael Fitch. He knew he would have to. The university had rules about dating other employees. But he hadn’t wanted to tell anyone yet, hadn’t wanted to disturb the delicate equilibrium of their relationship. Somehow, he still thought of Evelyn as someone who might disappear. It seemed so magical that he had found her again, that he had found happiness again with her.

In the mornings, they sat together in her living room, drinking coffee and going over their lesson plans. He would make a joke about Chaucer, and she would get it, tell him not to make jokes while she was drinking because, if she laughed, it would send coffee up her nose.

He had given her a copy of his Arundell Press translation, and he liked to see it on her bookshelf. It made him feel as though he had become a part of her life. During the day they would stop by each other’s offices, checking in about how classes had gone, eating lunch together under a tree somewhere on campus, sharing some of their sandwiches with the squirrels.

In the evenings, they sat in front of the fireplace, drinking wine. It was already cold enough that he could build a fire. And they would talk, mostly about the poetry she wanted to write, because she hadn’t yet started to fill the notebook he’d given her. It was too difficult to concentrate on poetry when you were grading student papers, she said. And the article he was supposed to complete by Christmas.