Love and Glory
- Автор: Паркер Роберт Браун
- Год: 1983
- Язык: английский
- Год: Delacorte
- ISBN: 978-0-385-29261-0
- Жанр: Современные любовные романы
Электронная книга - «Love and Glory». Краткое содержание книги:
“There you go, distancing again.”
I nodded.
“I never understood exactly,” Jennifer said. “Maybe I can’t even now. I don’t have the same emotions you do. They’ve never been in need of control, I suppose. Or maybe they’re under such control that it’s a way of life. Either way I never quite understood how betrayed you must have felt.”
The lights came on suddenly. The bullhorn announced, “Five minutes.” Jennifer’s eyes widened as they came on and she thought of something. “Maybe still feel,” she said.
“No,” I said. “I’m beyond that. That way madness lies.”
The crowd inside the Student Union, on its feet, arms linked where possible, singing now lustily, waited in ominous sensuality. Outside the bullhorn sounded again. A bored mechanical voice, “You are trespassing. If you do not leave the premises of the Student Union in two minutes, you will be forcibly removed and subject to arrest.”
The singing grew lustier. Jennifer’s face was bright with excitement. Her hair was beautifully done. Her jewelry expensive, her eyeshadow flawless, her lips were parted and her teeth were very white. Occasionally she rubbed the tip of her tongue on her lower lip. I felt as if I might burst, like the ancient Greek fertility god. But what I felt wasn’t hubris. It was love and it nearly overpowered me.
“When the cops come, stay close to me,” I said.
Jennifer looked at me with the excitement gleaming in her face. “I can take care of myself,” she said.
“I know,” I said. “I was hoping you’d take care of me.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
On a June morning Jennifer and I went to the cellar of the Chapel Building at Taft to dig up our Ph.D.s. The diplomas were in cardboard boxes in which copy-machine paper had originally been shipped. Two undergraduate girls were in charge.
“We’ve come,” I said, “to receive our degrees.”
“Names?” one of the girls said.
We gave them. The girls shuffled through the boxes and found the diplomas, bound in red leather with TAFT UNIVERSITY in gold on the cover. The girl who’d asked for our names brought them to us. As she held them out she rendered a brief excerpt of the traditional graduation march, “Dah, da da da dah da.”
Afterward, holding the diplomas, we walked along the Charles River.
“Think how smart we are now,” I said.
“Yes,” Jennifer said, “dumb no more.”
“Should we celebrate?” I said.
“Yes, we should. I actually am very proud to have done this. When I went to college it was so that I could become educated and marry a man with a white-collar job. An educated woman was more interesting at cocktail parties and having dinner with the boss.”
A college crew swept by on the river, the oars moving in muscular unison, the coach following in a small red speedboat yelling instructions through a megaphone.
“I got my B.A. for somebody else,” Jennifer said. “But the Ph.D. was for me.”
“If nothing else,” I said, “it certifies endurance.”
Jennifer nodded. “It’s more,” she said. “It means I can proceed as Jennifer Grayle instead of Mrs. John Merchent.”
“It’s the way I prefer to think of you,” I said.
She smiled. “The Ph.D. is certification. But in fact, I may have learned more from you, Boonie, than I did from the Ph.D. In a way, you’ve brought me up. I had a chance to see in you things I see in no one else. You remain what you are. You are true to yourself.”
I smiled. Jennifer shook her head impatiently.
“I know that’s a cliché, true to yourself, but I don’t care. You are. You don’t betray what you are because you want something from someone or you are afraid of someone. Most men I know, and women, really do lead lives of quiet desperation. You don’t. Because you don’t I know that it’s possible not to.”
I knew if I pointed it out to her she’d see the irony of that, that she’d remember that my life was a single-minded desperation. But it would have led us to an area we tacitly avoided, an area too uncertain for us, where I, as much as she, feared the terrain and the consequences. So I nodded and shrugged. I knew what she meant. In a sense she was right. My one consuming desperation eliminated all others. Caring only for her, I was free to care about nothing else.
“You taught me by being with me, Boonie, and by being what you are. And by being...” Jennifer seemed briefly to search for the right word. Then she made a small laugh. “I’m so taken with my new intellectual eminence that I’m searching for original phrases. The hell with it. What I mean is that you are completely steadfast. Watching you manifest that has been of more service to me than I can say.”
“This should probably all be saved for Valentine’s Day,” I said. “But I have learned as much from you as you ever did from me. I’ve learned that my definitions, my rules, my certainties, are not universal, that feeling something strongly doesn’t make it right. You are good, and when you do things that I wouldn’t do, they can’t be bad. They can only be different.”
We stopped walking and Jennifer turned toward me and we looked at each other.
“Each of us seems to have been able to offer just what the other needed,” she said.
Beyond the point where we stood the river turned and deepened, flowing under trees that darkened its surface. As the channel narrowed and the water hastened in its rush, twigs that had floated placidly past us began to dance upon the surface, tossed by the compressed energies beneath them.
“Yes,” I said. “I have noticed that too.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
I had begun to excerpt small pieces from my journal and polish them and send them out to small intellectual magazines that paid you in free copies. The magazine published several of them and I was encouraged. They were not stories really, they were small, fragmentary set pieces whose meaning, if there was any, resided in the language itself. One reviewer called them sketches and said that my style was “spritely though not without error.”
Jennifer’s doctoral dissertation, Jane Austen and the Function of Being Female, was published, slightly revised, by the Wesleyan University Press and got some rather good reaction in the scholarly journals. Some of the feminist press liked it too, but some found it lacking in doctrinal purity.
“It’s what you get for using big words,” I said. We were having coffee in the faculty section of the Taft student cafeteria. Jennifer smiled.
“I don’t like it, Boonie. I hate being criticized.”
“Who likes it?”
“You’ve had criticism on those sketches you published. You don’t seem to mind.”
I shrugged. “It’s publish or perish,” I said. “If they keep me from perishing, I am willing to take some intellectual abuse in journals of limited circulation.”
“But it must make you angry sometimes, or hurt your feelings.”
“At a low level,” I said. “But not very deeply and not very long. I didn’t write it for them, you know? I like what I write. If you like it too, it’s unanimous.”
She shook her head. Around us the students ate and studied and read The Boston Globe. The smell of coffee and steam-table food dominated the other smells: tobacco, perfume, the disinfectant soap that they mopped the floors with. The noise was mostly boisterous student sounds. Profanity, the current phrases, the occasional blare of a portable radio. The service was mostly Styrofoam and plastic, so there was little of the clatter that you often hear in a cafeteria.
“That would never be enough for me,” Jennifer said. “Just your approval and my own. I need a larger audience. I need to be liked and admired by a lot of people.” She paused and sipped her coffee. “In fact, I tend to get angry at people who don’t like me or people who don’t like what I do. I hate disapproval and I am inclined to take it personally.”