Better not to think about John Grant in her bed, but memories couldn’t be erased, not even if she wanted to. Which she didn’t. And that was the heart of the problem.
They had watched each other for a whole academic year, September to May.
Angie first saw John Grant crossing Waverly Place; he caught her attention because, she told herself, he was a new face in the familiar river of students and staff and faculty. She soon realized two things: first, that she saw him most often around the English department building on certain days of the week, and second, that he was watching her, too.
There was nothing she could do about needing to pass that particular corner every day. It was on a straight line between the apartment she shared with Rivera and the film center. And anyway, she lectured herself, why should she? She saw thousands of faces every day, about half of them men. Some of those men looked at her; sometimes she looked back. She had had a fair share of men in her life, and would have more.
She could simply stop one day and ask him if he wanted to go for coffee. Except she didn’t, but neither could she keep herself from looking for him, and when she did find him, he was looking right back at her.
Not a month after it all started Rivera caught on. She was at first mystified that Angie, who had never been shy, should hang back. Then she decided to take the matter into her own hands. In short order Rivera had established that John Grant wasn’t new faculty at all, but a visiting professor who came downtown from Columbia three days a week to teach a course on Whitman’s New York. Straight and unattached.
“Good for him,” Angie said, keeping her eyes on the script in her lap.
Rivera said, “The only question is, which one of you will give in and make the first move.”
“Not me,” Angie said. “Not this time. It’s too corny for words, falling for a professor from afar.”
“Sometimes corny is what you need,” Rivera said.
“No, what I need is very simple, and I get that from Scott.”
To which Rivera snorted. She didn’t think much of Scott, a grad student in comp lit who was too quiet and too predictable for Rivera’s tastes. Angie liked having Scott around for just those reasons.
The problem was, there was no avoiding John Grant. The very idea of him was everywhere, floating in the air, unavoidable. Total strangers seemed intent on sharing things Angie couldn’t possibly need to know. Waiting in line at Starbucks, she heard undergraduates discussing ways to run into him, what might interest him, if it would be a good idea to try to get into one of his courses uptown, if it was true that he was one of the
Grant
Grants and lived in twenty rooms on Morningside.
“He rows every morning,” one of them said.
“Should have gone out for crew,” said her friend.
But Angie didn’t have to hatch plots; wherever she went she ran into John Grant, and soon he was featuring in many of her dreams.
“It’s redirected anxiety,” she told Rivera when they were in the editing lab together. “Easier than worrying about what comes next.” Neither of them had gone on the job market, sticking to their early plans to stay independent. The hard part was watching the other people in their class flinging themselves out into the world, accepting jobs with Lucasfilm and PBS. Of course she had to find something else to obsess about, Angie told herself, and a man she would never talk to was just the ticket.
By January they were saying hello, holding glances a little too long, each of them calculating the next step, the potential gain and the complications. Scott called and she found herself making excuses.
John Grant was faculty; she was a grad student. Angie had nothing to do with his department, but it was touchy, these days, professors and students, no matter the details. That excuse made Rivera laugh out loud. She wasn’t one for rules when it came to basic human instincts.
“There he is,” she would say in an exaggerated whisper, elbowing her. “Your guy.”
Rivera described herself as part English, part Jewish, part Puerto Rican, part Mohawk, and all nose. She could smell attraction on the skin; she said it reminded her of apricots cooking.
On the day they finished the last of their class work—nineteen years of schooling, done and over forevermore—Angie and Rivera sat out on the roof of their apartment building on West Eighth Street and drank red wine. There were three different parties going on in the building across the street, one on each floor. It was more entertaining than television, which felt like work.
Rivera matched up people from one party with people from another, man on man, woman on man, woman on woman.
“Those two,” Rivera said. And: “Those three.” She picked out somebody for herself, a young black woman wearing what looked like a Chanel suit. Rivera considered it her mission in life to wean women from their preoccupation with penetration.
“Go on over,” Angie encouraged her.
“Soon,” Rivera promised. “Oh, no, look at that.” A tall, awkward type with a very, very short woman, both of them wobbly drunk. “That won’t last a week, but the sex will be interesting.”
Angie laughed so hard that she almost choked on her wine, and while Rivera was pounding on her back they both caught sight of John Grant, talking to the Chanel suit.
“Your guy, my girl,” Rivera said. “Let’s go.”
Angie wasn’t drunk but she wasn’t quite sober, either. Otherwise she might not have done it, followed Rivera across the street and up the stairs. She walked right up to John Grant, her blood pounding in her ears.
He was wearing an immaculate white shirt with long sleeves folded to just below the elbow, black jeans, and a day’s worth of beard. She had to tilt her head back to look him in the eyes: blue, with creases at the corners. He gave her a flashbulb smile, blinding, electric; she felt the shock of it slide up her back.
“You’ve been watching me,” she said.
“Oh yeah. It’s what I do.”
He had deep voice and a very southern accent, something Angie hadn’t noticed in passing, and never anticipated. The surprise of it robbed her of what she was going to say next.
He leaned toward her. “It was your hair first caught my eye.”
She touched it: untamable, best ignored.
In the noisy room he leaned closer still. “It’s beautiful.”
Angie smelled the beer on his breath, and other things: curry, a hint of ginger. Food was something she could always talk about.
“You went out for Indian,” Angie said sadly. More than a little drunk now, but it had less to do with alcohol than with the way he was looking at her.
“Come on, Angeline,” he said, taking her elbow. “We’ll get you something to eat.”
“You know my name,” she said, letting herself be directed.
“You don’t know mine?” He drew back to look, challenging her: she could try coy, or they could get right to it.
“John Grant. Columbia English Department. Straight and unattached. Except for—” She looked for the Chanel suit and saw her in the kitchen with Rivera, both of them laughing.
“Gloria. Just a colleague,” he said, and steered her toward the door.
They sat across from each other at a small table covered with dishes: lamb vindaloo, chicken tikka, a great milky bowl of cucumbers in yogurt, curried potatoes. Angie had an appetite, and food was the right distraction just now.
They talked easily. She told him about her thesis project, the short documentary she had put together about the Armenian population in the Bronx, the company she and Rivera wanted to start up. Her family over the river in Hoboken, the diner.
“Mangiamele,” he said. “Apple eater.”
She glanced up at him over the rim of her cup. “You speak Italian?”
It turned out he had spent a year in Italy as an undergraduate, but the stories he liked to tell, the ones that made his face open up, had to do with his family. He had a brother in law school who made a career out of flaunting expectations, a whole town of relatives in Georgia and another, aging contingent on the Upper West Side, but he was closer to his mother’s people down south. The apartment building he lived in on Morningside had been in his father’s family since 1910. The fact that he had accepted a tenured position at Princeton starting in the fall slipped out sideways when she asked him if he thought of moving back to Georgia.
And all the while they kept falling into short silences, looking at each other and smiling. Never talking about the months they had just spent circling each other; not needing to.
Then she had enough of food and of waiting, too.
“Rivera says—”
“Rivera?”
“My roommate. My friend. With the”—she swirled her hand around her head—“embroidered headscarf?”
“With Gloria in the kitchen.”
“Yes, that’s the one. Rivera says we’ve got a month at most, but it will be good while it lasts.”
He was trying not to smile. “What leads Rivera to such a hasty conclusion?”
Angie was flustered now and felt the first throb of remorse. “Probably she was overly optimistic.”
That was the first time she saw a particular look come into his eyes, a narrowing that meant he had plans. Her hand was on the table and he picked it up, pressed her fingers to his own wrist. Muscular forearms—
should have gone out for crew
—and cool skin; she felt herself jerk. She said, “Your pulse is racing.”
“Oh, yeah. I got the Kentucky Derby going on.”
That flashbulb of a smile; she had to look away.
On the street in front of the restaurant he caught her hand again, pressed her up against the wall to take her pulse, and then he kissed her. Ivy League and old money, but he was good at it. Angie kissed him back, and meant it.
They walked back to Angie’s apartment on West Eighth Street, no sign of Rivera or Gloria of the Chanel suit, and thank God; Angie had never been so nervous or so sure. But still she went first thing to the refrigerator and stood in its cold light, one arm on the open door, feeling him behind her and afraid to turn around. Gooseflesh on her back and arms and the insides of her thighs.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Genuflecting in front of the leftovers. It’s an Italian thing. Want something to drink?” She took a can of beer and turned to touch his cheek with it. He started and covered her hand with his own, moved the can to her throat and down.
“Ah,” she said, and he kissed her there, up against the overfilled refrigerator, the smells of salami and Gorgonzola and very ripe peaches rising around them. The cold can pressed to her collarbone, and his mouth, warm and soft and knowing.
That was the start of it.
At Jin-Woo’s Copy Hop she wrote the two-sentence cover letter to the university president and watched the pages of the initialed and signed contract go through the fax machine while Ramon told her about his latest idea for a movie:
Die Hard
meets
Priscilla, Queen of the Desert
.
“Woman hires a hit man—she’s tired of her husband screwing around, you see it? But a chick shows up, a hit woman. Then she turns out to be a man after all. A transvestite. So the rich lady, she’s all confused because she’s got the hots for another woman, and then she finds out she’s a he anyway.” Ramon’s tattoos glowed in the fluorescent lights. “I’m thinking Penelope Cruz.”
“As the transvestite?” Angie could usually coax a smile out of Ramon, but today he was wound up in fame and fortune. He frowned at her lack of vision.
“It’s been done,” she told him.
“Victor/Victoria, The Crying Game.”
Ramon leaned across the counter, muscles in his shoulders rolling. “Angie,” he said. “Listen to me, girl. You going to grab a good thing when you see it, or let this one get away from you too?”
There’s the question,
Angie thought as she went back to the computers to write the harder letter.