Love and Glory

“So how come you married John?” We were in the midst of the afternoon. Students wandered up and down the corridor outside my office door, keeping appointments with professors, keening over grades, and puzzling over comments in the margins. From the main office there was the sound of typewriters and the mimeograph machine and the photocopy machine. But in my office the silence seemed to spiral back down a dwindling quarter-century as I asked, out loud, for the first time, the question to whose drumbeat I had stepped since 1954.

“You wanted all of me, Boonie. Not just to love me, to own me. To possess me, to own my soul, to own all of me. I don’t think I quite knew it then. But now I do, and one way that I do is because now you love me. Just love me. Don’t wish to hold me in vile duress. Now you can trust me, and so now I can trust you.”

“You’ve made me whole,” I said.

She shook her head. “The commitment made you whole. Even if we were never to be lovers you’d be whole.”

“Ever wilt thou love,” I said. “And she be fair.”

She nodded. “Something like that.”

“But if we were never lovers, I wouldn’t be happy,” I said. “I would always want to be.”

“But you’d be whole.”

I nodded.

Jennifer’s face was steady on mine. I listened to the sound of my breath going in and out. I heard myself swallow once.

“Nineteen fifty-four was too early,” Jennifer said. “Neither of us was whole then.” I could feel myself rocking slightly in my chair, volitionless, thick with silence, faintly dizzy. Jennifer got up and went to the office door and closed it and turned and looked at me and said, “Now we are.”