The Last Time They Met_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [32]
He turned his head to look at her. He who might always expect the worst now. Or perhaps he’d heard a catch in her voice.
—He died . . . She stopped, surprised by the threat of fresh tears. Of leukemia, when he was forty. My aunt’s never gotten over it. He was her baby. Linda picked up a bar napkin in case she needed it. To think the youngest of us would be the first to go. He left a wife and two babies, twins.
Thomas shook his head. I taught Jack to ice-skate, he said, disbelieving.
—I remember. She blinked with other memories. It was a terrible death. It sometimes makes me glad that Vincent went the way he did. So quick. He might not have known what happened to him. She stopped, remembering Thomas’s prayers for Billie. She wiped her nose and sat up. So there you have it.
Thomas nodded slowly.
—What are the odds that six children would make it to old age? she wondered aloud. Probably not very good.
—Better than they used to be.
—I had dinner with the group, she said. But have you eaten?
—No. I’m not hungry.
—What did you do today on your panel? Everyone was all abuzz.
Thomas put a hand over his eyes. I lost it, he said, only pretending to be abashed.
—What happened?
—Some woman in the audience took me to task for exploiting Billie’s . . . He stopped. Which was all right, I suppose. But then Robert Seizek, who was on the panel with me, took the woman’s point and said so, and I was nearly shaking with the idea that a novelist, a fucking novelist, would say such shit. And, well . . . He stopped again.
Thomas wore his collar open, his tie loosened. His shirt billowed over his belt, which rode lower than it used to.
—You seem pleased with yourself, she said.
—It was a dull panel.
She laughed.
—I bought one of your books today and reread bits of it in the barber’s chair, he said. I even read the flap copy again.
—You did? The admission rattled her more than she was prepared to show. When had Thomas had time for this? Her fingers nervously caressed the stem of the glass. Though the vodka was getting to her a bit now, making her stomach warm.
—Do you teach literature or writing? he asked.
—Mostly workshops.
Thomas groaned in sympathy. I tried that. I wasn’t any good at it. I couldn’t hide my contempt for the work.
—That would be a problem. She turned toward him slightly and crossed her legs. A different tailored blouse tonight, but the same skirt. He would see the uniform for what it was.
—What’s the college like? he asked. I’ve never been there.
She told him that there was a quadrangle in the shape of a cross, with a chapel at one end and, incongruously, a hotel at the other. There were stone buildings and archways and leaded casement windows, made to look ancient on the Oxford-Cambridge model, but entirely constructed within the last two decades. It was a school unmarked by any idiosyncrasy or ugliness, by any of the new, which surely any institution that had truly evolved would possess. It was a universe sprung fully fashioned from the earth without having paid the dues of age. (Like America, Thomas said.) And sometimes it seemed a stage set, she told him, although the dramas that were enacted there were real enough: an abnormally high number of professor-student love affairs, alcohol overdoses at frat parties, a near epidemic of razor-cutting (mostly females), the endless machinations of jealous faculty. I see my job as one of encouragement. It’s difficult to teach someone to write.
—Do you encourage the poor students?
—One has to.