You Are Not a Stranger Here - Adam Haslett [65]
From where he’s standing, hard now thinking about her, he can’t see her dog’s ear. He leans his head in against the glass, trying to catch a glimpse of the side of her face, her hand, the drawing, leaving out of his field of vision the approaching juggernaut of Mrs. Theodopoulos storming the aisle, ballistic finger outstretched. She is halfway to the door when he sees her, the class turning now to watch, his heart thudding.
Giddy, he dodges and runs.
From the third floor walkway he can see across the courtyard, through the window, over Mrs. Theodopoulos’s shoulder, and into the first two rows of the art room. Since Lauren’s friends started laughing at the sight of him a few weeks back he’s known there is no point in playing it cool. He stares at her without pretense. Bring it on, he thinks, bring on the ridicule, go ahead, call me pathetic and ugly and desperate, snicker at me, roll your eyes, say you’d never touch me in a million years, that you’d all rather sleep with a monkey, go ahead, shout it.
No one seems to be watching him. They scrawl at their papers, minds still in bed, bodies drowsing through first period.
Then it happens. She looks up over her easel, and squinting, sees him. She smiles. He is sure of it. Lauren Jencks has identified him at thirty yards, and she’s smiling—at him or with him, he doesn’t dare to guess. He plays it cool, waves casually, starts walking away. It is decided then, he will take his tray to her table today, giggling friends be damned.
He knows he must calm himself before they meet.
In the bathroom stall he tries reading a page on the battle of Shiloh but gives up and hurriedly imagines four blond girls licking his naked body, chiding himself as he goes for his lack of originality, but relieved, when he is done, to breathe deeply for the first time that morning.
ELIZABETH WAKES TO colors more vivid: the Oriental carpet’s swirls of burgundy and gold; dawn kindling the sky an immaculate blue. She puts on her bathrobe and moves to her spot by the window. Planes of the rising sun sparkle in the courtyard’s frosted grass. It is the washed light of autumn that shone on the lawn of the hospital down on the Connecticut coast, the hospital where Elizabeth stayed a month the year before she and Will were married—this memory arriving now with unaccustomed ease.
He would come down from Cambridge on Sundays in his father’s old Lincoln Town Car. They’d take walks on the cliffs overlooking Long Island Sound. He was a bookish man, nervous. Like Elizabeth, he’d grown up in New England in a house of lapsed Episcopalians, raised like her on a liberal conscience, parents sighing resignedly over the New York Times, salvation—if there were such a thing—a promise of reform rather than redemption. Together she and Will managed hours of politeness with no mention of Elizabeth’s reasons for being in an institution—her little confusions, as her parents called them—the occasional trouble remembering where she was, the rarer sense she was being spoken to. Will was completing his doctorate in sociology at Harvard and they spoke of that. They’d met in his discussion section the semester before she’d taken a leave from Radcliffe, a school her parents still hoped back then she might return to.
Toward the end of her stay, Will had an appointment alone with her psychiatrist. Elizabeth behaved badly, listening at the door. “A mild imbalance,” the man said. She has never known if he was merely a sexist who thought her hysterical or a kind man who understood what Will meant to her, perhaps even a man who let his kindness supervene his judgment. When Will asked him if they should still get married, the