Love and Glory

Chapter Twenty-Four

I knew since I came to Taft that I would see her eventually. It was, after all, why I had come. I had steadily developing confidence in my self-control. So I was in some sense ready when it happened.

The room was crowded. There were a lot of students and most of the English faculty. Many of both were smoking and the air was close. People were sipping sherry and eating potato chips with some kind of sour cream dip. There were many more women than men in the student body and about the reverse ratio in the faculty. I got a glass of sherry and sipped it sparingly as I glanced around the room. I always looked for her. I had begun looking for her the moment I got off the plane in Boston. I was where she lived. I might see her anytime. A young woman in a loose blue dress was urging her interpretation of “Sunday Morning” upon a professor wearing a khaki shirt and a flowered tie under his dark gray double-breasted suit. There were cat hairs on the suit, his brown shoes were unshined, and he needed a haircut.

“I would suggest,” he was saying, “that the ‘ambiguous undulations’ which those pigeons make at the end of the poem can be seen to suggest Stevens’s own stance.”

“But,” she said, leaning toward him with her sherry clamped unthought of in her intense fist, “didn’t the Holy Ghost appear as a dove?”

“Certainly,” he said, and smiled as kindly as he could, “but that doesn’t mean...”

I moved on. Merchent was there with a number of young women gathered about him. “Wisconsin is excellent,” he was saying, “and the University of North Carolina, surprisingly, has a very fine graduate program.” All the young women nodded. “Of course,” he went on, “Yale is unequaled for its eighteenth-century program. Fred Pottle has done some really fine work down there.” The young women nodded again, just as if they knew who Fred Pottle was. I knew that behind the nod most of them were trying to figure out if the eighteenth century was the seventeen hundreds or the eighteen hundreds.

Jennifer was near him but faced away, talking to the chairman of the department. She wore a knit dress of burnt orange, tied at the waist with a soft thin cord. Her hair was done in a French twist, her engagement diamond flashed on her hand as she talked, and her face was as brilliant with animation and life as it had been when I met her. I felt as if I would sink to my knees.

I did not. I stood as motionless and still as I had the first time I had seen her, twelve years before, and let the impact of her wash over me... the golden girl... the king’s daughter... the slickness of silk beneath cloth... lipstick. The room and people seemed to coalesce around her like one of those children’s toys where you look through a viewer and turn the knob and endless patterns form and re-form... a jar in Tennessee... a magic lantern on the wall... I inhaled as deeply as I could and got steadier. The chairman was smiling as he listened, and nodding. He threw back his head to laugh. I moved carefully, as if on a slippery surface, toward them and stood so that when she was through speaking to the chairman she would see me. She wouldn’t see me before. I remembered her concentration, and she did but one thing at a time.

I waited with a feeling of trembly exhaustion moving along my arms and legs. It was the same feeling I got when I’d finished squeezing out an extra repetition on the bench, one final shuddering dip on the parallel bars. I took in another deep breath. Control, I said to myself, control. The word helped me. I clung to it, fixing on it the way I used to fix on a light in the dark when I was drunk and the room spun. Control.

The chairman said something about more sherry and turned from her. She moved, as I knew she would, to find someone else. She would never stand alone in a social circumstance. Her eyes passed over my face and on. And stopped. And came back. They looked at me. They got wider. Her mouth opened and shut. And opened slightly and I saw her take a sharp breath.

I said, “Hello, Jennifer.”

“Oh,” she said. “Oh.”

“It is good to see you again.” My voice was steady and calm, far from me, off in some rational distance, proceeding in its rational way.

“Boonie,” she said.

“The very one,” my voice said.

“Boonie, my God, Boonie.” She took my hand suddenly and leaned over and kissed me on the mouth lightly, and pulled back. “Jesus Christ,” she said.

I nodded.

“You son of a bitch,” she said. “Where have you been?”

“Round the world,” I said, “and I’m going again.”

“I want to hear,” she said, her face now intent upon me, as it had been upon the chairman. “I want to hear about everything.”

“I’ll be happy to tell you,” I said.

“We’ll have lunch,” she said. “Where are you?”

“Here,” I said. “I’m a student.”

“My God, so am I.”

Her face was a little better than it had been when she was twenty-one. It knew more things. It was not — and the thought squeaked along my nerve lengths — the face of a virgin, for instance. Nor was it, as much as it had been, the face of a child. It contained that same sense of charge, of kinesis, of distilled and radiant femaleness that it had contained when I first saw it, but it had become more elegant.

“Here?” I said. “You’re a student here?”

“Yes, I’m working on my M.A. and I have an assistantship. I teach two sections of freshman English.”

She was right here. I hadn’t been lucky often in the last eight years, but the luck I’d had was mortal. It was luck that Tom Hernandez was hosing down his sidewalk in front of the restaurant. It was luck that Jennifer had gone back to school and here. Where we’d be near, where I had room to work. My hands felt like they were shaking, but I looked at the one that held the sherry and they weren’t, they were steady.

She had her hands on her hips and her head cocked looking at me. “Boonie,” she said, “you look wonderful. Whatever you’ve been doing it’s certainly been good for you.”

“Maybe,” I said. “When do you want to have lunch?”

“Tomorrow,” she said. “Faculty Club.”

“Will they let me in?”

“Are you a teaching assistant?”

“No,” I said. “I’m a sophomore.”

“Oh, okay. I’ll meet you out front. I have a card as a T.A. and a card as John’s wife.”

“Noon?”

“I’ll be there. Boonie, there’s so much to talk about.”

“I hope so,” I said.