Snapper (22 page)

I didn’t tell her that it was my first time. She didn’t tell me that she had someone else waiting for her in Bloomington.

Talking to Lola was like leading some old-fashioned dance. She did not often bring up a topic herself, but she responded to anything I said thoughtfully, at length, ending in a droll flourish or a penetrating question. I was sometimes caught off guard by this when I was simply thinking aloud. Some opinion I didn’t know I had would surface and she would probe it delicately until—usually—I reconsidered.

Yet facing each other over the table and waiting for food was initially awkward. It had been six years since we last met in person. It occurred to me that we never had mutual friends. That, after all, is the rule for such conversations: exchanging bulletins on the lives of mutual acquaintances and gossiping about mutual dislikes.

I never had many friends in Bloomington. It’s a pretty, pleasant town, but there’s nothing there but the university.
Consequently there’s a kind of suffocating liberal orthodoxy that emanates from thousands of roosting academics, and an ideological effluvia that trails after shoals of jazz musicians, abstract expressionist painters, and self-published poets—my friends tended to be people who didn’t like it much either. Important research is done at IU, particularly in ornithology, but it is overshadowed and undergirded by a culture of vapid SAVE THE PLANET sloganizing and forty thousand earnest ignorant undergraduates insisting that YOU CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE. There’s a competent Mathematics Department there running a good statistics course, but obviously those kids aren’t enrolled in it. I had imagined a university town to be a place where intelligent people had original thoughts and argued about them in good faith from first principles. Lola was never that naïve. She ran around with all kinds of tedious political activists and people who studied post-things.

One of Lola’s English professors published a passionate essay in
The Chronicle of Higher Education
when we were undergraduates. In it she argued that although it might be negligent not to teach recent developments in the field, it was surely next to criminal to go around annihilating students’ enthusiasm by discussing whether, for example, Jane Austen tacitly condoned slavery. Let them learn, she wrote, to cultivate guilt and grievance elsewhere; in the classroom let them learn to read appreciatively.

“The Guilt and Grievance crowd,” Lola told me at the time (already adept in a sort of dismissive Bloomington tone that preempts argument), “took this as an accusation of indoctrinating young minds.” Later that year the professor was denied tenure and she left to take up a post at a community college in Kansas.

If I were going to live in Indiana again, I’d live in Bloomington, but at the time I found it overwhelmingly disappointing. To Lola it was salvation from the unbearable enduring shame and torment of being from Evansville. Every art opening, poetry reading, foreign film, irrelevant protest march somehow eradicated her fearful manic past; and of course every tedious activist, Borges aficionado, and cut-glass sculptor she took up with redeemed her by association. The longer I lived in Bloomington marinating in militant dogma the more I began to think that perhaps once upon a time there was a place in America where two people of diametrically opposite views could respectfully disagree: that was in Evansville, circa 1988, the last year my dad the mathematician shared an office with Shane’s dad the poet. I don’t mean that they were adversaries in the Last Civil Dispute (there should be a historical marker), but that it was only possible in Evansville because it is so far behind the rest of the country—which had already hived off into smug homogeneities like Bloomington. Or, for that matter, Brattleboro, Vermont.

Lola was too smart to remain under the spell of those other men for very long. Yet she had trouble breaking things off with anyone. All through college she increasingly snuck off with me. When I could get her we would spend a day together cycling somewhere outside Bloomington to pick strawberries or sitting in Dunn Meadow reading Yeats—
I am looped in the loops of her hair
; Lola’s hair has no loops, but that is beside the point, and Yeats would be the first to tell you this. She would spend the night with me, and in the morning explain why she couldn’t leave Owen or Ian or James. I had other names for them, of course. When she left I began drinking, and found myself, hours later, guilty of some ridiculous act. Pulling a pizza drunkenly out of the oven I burned my forearm on the
oven pan, horizontally. Immediately I applied my arm to the pan vertically to scar myself with a capital L. The result was a lower case
t
so I did it again, and again, until I got it right. I still have the scar.

I found out one boyfriend’s last name during an argument at the end of a week we spent together. I had never even heard of him but it was a week, apparently, that he spent in California. After she left my apartment I looked him up in the phone book and found his address. I don’t know what I intended to do.

With twelve bottles of beer in my backpack and a pair of binoculars around my neck I climbed a hickory tree in the courtyard of his apartment complex, and I watched him watching TV. I did not know I would earn my living in more or less the same way a few years later—that, in fact, Lola would be responsible for introducing me to my mentor, Gerald.

If Lola was there she never appeared through the window, and I never saw him speak. He struck me as a kind of dislocated surfer, with straggly blond hair and a blank expression. I think he was an aspiring filmmaker, but I get them all mixed up. I got bored of him very quickly, and I couldn’t see the TV. For the rest of the evening I lobbed my empty beer bottles into a pool of light on the road beneath a streetlamp. The glass glinted and bounced as it shattered and came to a rest gleaming back at me in an invitation to shower down more. I peeled the labels off for purity. Twelve bottles in thousands of shards beneath a bright light make a beautiful sight from fifteen feet up, a faint reflection of the sunlight on the Ohio flashing like coins, and I wished I had brought more.

I was sometimes tempted—even encouraged—by friends of mine to go pick a fight with one or another of Lola’s other men—for my own benefit, someone said. It would have been
stupid and juvenile, but that is not why I refrained. It would have been
inadequate
. I wanted to burn their villages and pillage their monasteries and spike their severed heads. I dreamed of living in a dueling age with my breast pocket filled with letters from Lola. When finally Joe or Russell or Chris ran me through with a minié ball or a blade, my heart’s blood would seep through to censor her indiscretions. That was a fate I could have accepted. What I could not abide was the banality of a small Midwestern town full of students screwing each other without consequence.

And yet, reconsidering now, it seems to me that I had the best of an impossible situation. She did not, could not, deceive me as comprehensively as she deceived those other men, and now, fifteen years on, we are still, in her word, friends.

Over lunch I asked her how often she returned to Evansville.

“Only to see my brother,” she said. “My family isn’t like your family. Educated.” She meant affluent. I had been to her mother’s house once when we had first met. It was very clean but very small. It now sits in one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in town, where—says Lola—people with no shoes live in houses with no windows. It wasn’t like that back then.

“I rarely visit. I don’t really go anywhere.” She shrugged.

“Me, neither,” I said.

“Remind me what you do in Vermont?”

“I work in a hawk hospital,” I said. “A raptor rehabilitation center, officially.”

“How lovely,” she said.

“Only job I could find,” I said. “My CV is a train wreck.”

“Where did you get your PhD?” I said. I thought this was a safe question, but I was wrong.

“In Michigan, where we live now. I did my dissertation on Yeats,” she said, as if this were unimportant, an afterthought.

She wore heavy owlish glasses I resented for obscuring her face. The lenses magnified the folds in her eyelids distractingly. She wore makeup, too; discreetly and carefully and wholly unnecessarily.

“Well, why did you decide to get a PhD in the first place?”

“I was tired of staring at computers all day. I wrote software manuals for a while. I needed something a little more human than that.”

She had small perfect hands that almost disappeared behind her pint glass whenever she sipped her beer. Her knuckles were white, her fingers pale; she was thin, angular, and exact.

I couldn’t imagine where or how she had gone straight. That is, she was less animated, established in her new career, and seemed suddenly to me like anyone else—beautiful and brilliant yet dull and predictable, stable and sane at last but circumscribed and cloistered in her own narrow academic world. Once at a greasy Waffle House at ten in the morning she had leaned over the table and kissed me urgently for no reason. Customers stared, but she paid no attention. I could not imagine the woman facing me now doing the same thing—could not imagine even the idea of it penetrating her heavy glasses and polished professorial speech.

“If you don’t mind my asking,” I said, “what happened to your first marriage?”

“I got bored,” she said. I could have guessed that much. “We had the same literary tastes, I suppose, but nothing else in common. Two months after we married we found we simply had nothing to talk about.”

I tried to imagine this. The best conversations I have ever
had have been with Lola, once discussing peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for upward of twenty minutes. Obviously the sandwiches had nothing to do with it: Lola could make anything entertaining. I could not picture the man who could find nothing to talk about with her.

“Nothing to talk about? Was he an accountant or something?”

“No. An English professor.”

When Lola had moved away from Indiana I became involved with a series of other women who were her opposite. That is, they were faithful and trustworthy and steadfast, as well as shallow and self-absorbed. I did not seek them out or calculate my way to her antithesis, of course, but I was in some sense recoiling from her unconsciously for years. I wondered about these ripples of consequence and whether she had claimed that PhD in a similar reaction to that first beleaguered boring husband.

Briefly, over that lunch, I wondered: How had I ever let myself drift away to Vermont while Lola still breathed, in any condition, place, or marital status? I understood suddenly the purpose of that phone call. She had meant for me to book the next flight to Michigan.

“Are you seeing anyone in Vermont?” said Lola.

“I don’t know.”

“Shouldn’t you find out?”

“I’ve spent some time with someone lately, but things don’t just happen anymore.”

“Does someone have a name?”

“Annie.”

“Perhaps you should make things happen.”

I was being evasive. I was in touch with Annie every day, partly because I worked with her but also because something
was developing between us. Yet I was reluctant to disclose this to Lola. I hoped to see, behind the composed and prosperous woman across from me, some flash of the old Lola, to revel one more time in her unguarded affection. I didn’t want to talk about Annie.

“Ann Arbor is a lot like Bloomington,” she said. “I’ve been shifting around between tiny lefty liberal enclaves all my adult life, I guess.”

“I thought you were a city girl,” I said.

“I am, but we can’t,” she said. “Eric has joint custody with his ex-wife. They can’t move—we can’t move—unless we do it all together. She wants to raise goats in Oregon or something. Eric wants the best for the girls. I thought about Chicago but I can’t. I’m so lucky to have him.”

Yeah.

“I do find Ann Arbor claustrophobic, though,” she said. “It’s the lefty enclave thing. Full of grad students talking about polyamory. If you suggest that you think monogamy is a nice idea they look down their noses at you.”

If I had said something like that to Lola, she would have known, instinctively, why. I could not tell whether buried in that statement lay some sort of guilt or apology, some sort of unnecessary warning about any after-lunch ideas I might be entertaining, or whether she was merely repeating a memorable exchange. At any rate, it did sound exactly like Bloomington. I said so, and she sighed.

She wore a necklace with a circular silver pendant, and she had silver hoops in each ear. I could not remember her wearing jewelry at all—in fact, fifteen years ago her ears were not pierced. She has no earlobes. I wondered if these were the trappings of a new domesticity—gifts from Eric, perhaps. Was she forced to pierce her ears because Eric was unobservant?

On her right wrist she wore a silver bangle. With her copper hair and freckled arms, I would have given her gold.

“Do you like teaching?” I said. I could not picture anything more distracting to an undergraduate male animal than Professor Lola.

“Sometimes. It would be easier in an empty room. All the kids updating their Facebook status get kind of distracting.”

“But sometimes you get a student like you were?”

“Yes and no. I get good students but they don’t come from my background. My good students are good because they’re expected to be good.”

“You’re an anomaly,” I said.

“I certainly feel like one sometimes,” she said.

Our food arrived.

She began to eat her fries one by one, chewing thoroughly, and somehow I was disgusted. I began shoveling mine in. I almost chewed with my mouth open just to test her.

And I waited, silently, for her to remember anything that mattered at all.

I angled my burger to spill ketchup on my shirt. I felt grease dribbling down my chin, and I didn’t wipe it off. A younger, earlier Lola would have seen this and known something was amiss, but she continued to prattle about the facts and circumstances of life with no recognition of its deeper currents; she gave no honor to memory and did not acknowledge that anything abided between us. I ordered another beer, though it was not even two in the afternoon and I had to drive back to the mausoleum. Small talk is exhausting.