All This Talk of Love Read online

  “I know, Antonio. I’ve been asking you for three months now.”

  “When? Where was I?”

  “Not out loud,” she said. “Inside, to myself. I figured sooner or later you’d hear.”

  “Why not just . . . out loud?”

  She bowed her head. She was an Italian wife of the old fashion. They had married when she was a girl. She might have learned to read his mind, but she still could not ask him to do what it took to make a child. He had not reached for her in the year since Tony died.

  It didn’t happen that night. Or the night after. She felt ashamed for wanting it to and worried what Antonio thought of her for agreeing to his suggestion, for not resisting, for dishonoring the memory of their son.

  On a Wednesday afternoon weeks later, he came down to the basement, where she was measuring drapes, and handed her six white roses wrapped in blue and pink ribbons. In the past, the few times he’d brought Maddalena flowers, they were violets, her favorite. This occasion, though, did not call for violets. Roses had music. They gave permission. She stood at her worktable, the roses in one hand and a stick of chalk in the other.

  They started there on the worktable, the drapes pushed to the side in a wrinkled heap. The next morning in their bed. He showed up early from the restaurant the night after that. The roses went brown in the vase on the nightstand. There was a new electricity between them, a live current trapped just under their skin. It was the force that connects husband to wife, keeps their hearts pumping, keeps one from spinning away from the other even when spinning away seems like the only way to escape grief.

  They lay side by side, sheets pulled up to their chests, and spoke Italian, as they often did when alone, but they would not look each other in the eyes. Maddalena fixed hers on the burnt-out bulb in the floor lamp in the corner. To meet Antonio’s eyes was to betray Tony. And to admit they were taking a big risk. Giving birth to Prima had left her in a coma for a week, and though Tony had been easy, who knew how her body had changed in sixteen years? The baby could be born deformed. Back in the village, women her age were already grandmothers.

  If he’d been born a girl, they’d have named him Antonia. But he was Francesco, after Antonio’s father, and from the beginning he was like an old man himself, quiet and serious and smart even though he moved slow. He was as different from his brother as two boys could be, wanting always to be left alone—first with his little toy cars, later his homework and his books and the noise he called music. He didn’t seem to need or want to be around anyone but Maddalena. Like Tony, he got top grades in school, won all the awards for English and history, but unlike Tony, at the ceremonies only his teachers came up to congratulate him. He never brought any friends home. No sleepovers, no birthday parties. As a teenager he sat most summer days in the recliner holding a book in front of his face, blocking the sunlight like a vampire. His father came to think of Frankie as the sick child they’d feared he’d be, deformed from the inside.

  “He’s OK, you think?” Antonio would ask her. He meant in the head. He meant, You’re keeping an eye on him, yes?

  “Better than OK,” Maddalena would reply. “He doesn’t need any friends but us.” And because Frankie belonged to her more than to him, and always would, since that night she looked up from her scrubbing, Antonio never argued. He gave him over to her. Tony had loved his mother, of course, in the way that all boys do, but what he’d felt for his father was stronger, deeper. There should be a word for that: for the different quality of love a child feels for one parent over the other.

  What Tony was to Antonio, Frankie became to Maddalena: the first person he’d want to hear one of his stories, the last person he wanted to talk to before he went to bed. When the sixth-grade teacher asked his class to write about their heroes, Frankie chose his mother. For an art project, he traced an old Polaroid of Maddalena as a teenager and colored it in to make her look like a movie star. He couldn’t stand to be apart from her the weekends she spent in the Poconos for dance competitions, not because he didn’t get along with Prima, but because he worried he’d forget the things he wanted to tell her. “If I don’t tell you about them,” Frankie once said to her, “it’s like they didn’t happen.”

  To Maddalena, he might as well have said: I love you too much ever to leave this world. There was nothing better she could have heard from him than that.

  Then something, somewhere, went wrong. It took Frankie over, like a brainwash. She can’t reach him the way she used to, but she keeps trying, on their eleven o’clock calls, by telling him her fears and her opinions and all her secrets. She repeats the stories about Santa Cecilia and the boy who loved her, and the bike he made for her with his own two hands, and how the war came between them. She tells Frankie about his father, who started out a stranger and became a good man. She tells him whatever comes to her mind in the moment, to be like a friend to him because he’s had so few, and it used to work: he used to tell her his secrets back. Then he became a man, and she lost her magic. His life would happen even when she wasn’t in it.

  So if she wanted to be honest, this is what she’d tell the people at the dance studio about Frankie: My son’s the smartest boy; he’s going to be a professor someday, a PhD; this nowhere city couldn’t hold him; but I miss him the way he was when he was a boy and I was in the center of his life, and sometimes, God forgive me, I wish he’d been born deformed after all, living at home under my hand, where I could watch over him and talk to him face-to-face.

  This thought rouses her from her anxious half sleep. She sits up against the headboard, in the dark, the fast-music station still playing on low. Her heart is pounding. She has to call Frankie now, even though she talked to him just three hours ago, even though it’s late, because her heart won’t beat slow enough to let her sleep unless she hears his voice again. This has happened before, and he’s always forgiven her for disturbing him.

  The phone in her lap, she dials the long-distance number, but it rings and rings with no answer. Where can he be? At eleven, he’d called from the library and said he was almost done for the night. He knows that all she needs is for him to say, It’s OK, Ma, I’m fine, and she’ll reach back over Antonio, put the phone down, close the light, breathe easy, and let sleep take her.

  She keeps calling. One thirty. One forty-five. Two o’clock. Finally the roommate answers. “He likes to walk,” she says. “Sometimes he leaves the library and just walks.”

  “Walks where?” Maddalena asks, but the girl has hung up.

  When she calls again, at 3:30 a.m., he picks up. Finally. “Jesus, Ma,” he says.

  She’s on the cordless, pacing the basement, where Antonio can’t hear her banging on the walls. “Frankie!” she says, in tears. “Where do you go when you walk?”

  3 Resistance/Pleasure

  THEY HAVE A code, Frankie and Professor Birch. When she can make their standing date (Tuesdays and Thursdays from one to three, which, alas, preempts his soap), she leaves a note on department letterhead in his campus mailbox. “Dear Francesco—Finished chapter two—Coffee necessary—To discuss,” or some such Dickinsonian construction. If she has to cancel, she’ll leave a single yellow Post-it, blank or with a frowning, big-nosed cartoon face. The nose is metonymic of her husband, Dr. Amos Ziegler, chair of the Department of Engineering. Dr. Z. has not tapped her phone and does not monitor her e-mail; she just gets off on conducting a clandestine epistolary relationship. Birch’s specialization may be in the field of postcolonial studies, but her heart, as best Frankie knows it, lies in a distant century.

  He has never missed one of their dates. The Freshman Comp courses he teaches three mornings a week are his only blocked-out hours; the rest he spends grading papers or writing lesson plans or building additions onto the sprawling mansion of his dissertation zealously. Most nights, he’s the last person out of the library at 2 a.m., and if it weren’t for his walks and the shot of whiskey before bed, his mind would never settle. There are too many ideas, too many influences, too many
phone calls from his mother and sister reporting and worrying and complaining and negotiating, too much distance between them all (the writers, the critics, the family) and him, and also not enough. If anything, he needs the structure—the distraction, the release—of his Tuesday-Thursday sessions with Dr. Birch. Between here and his PhD lies a chasm he must fill with just the right pages in order to cross, like a magic bridge, and once he skips across that bridge, his new life will unfold before him. In the meantime, Professor Birch and the whiskey are his only vices.

  “Francesco—” begins Birch’s note today. “Have the new Zizek—Useful for your diss?—See me to retrieve—Cheers—R. Birch.”

  Her first name, Rhonda, is forbidden in every circumstance but one. Only in bed is Frankie allowed to call it out, and only when he’s close. Then she’ll swivel her hips or wrap her legs around his back the better to receive him. It has taken some trial and error, but over the past semester he has learned advanced methods to achieve her pleasure, and also to resign himself to the fact that, though enthusiastic, she is an impatient lover who favors frequency over quality. Most days, he’s not on his back five minutes catching his breath after the first time before she’s fiddling with him and climbing on top again. If he calls her Rhonda in some other context—over cereal at the kitchen table after they’ve gone a few rounds—she’ll reach across and tug his ear until he begs for mercy.

  He tears up her note and watches the pieces flutter into the recycling bin. He has come to campus this morning for the sole purpose of checking his mail, the rest of which consists of flyers on brightly colored paper advertising various politically charged talks. He must resist such talks, and the spiraling conversations afterward, to avoid the possibility of new ideas and textures for the arguments in his dissertation. So he sends the stack of flyers, too, fluttering.

  Frankie’s first year, he attended every lecture he could fit into his schedule. He marked up the precirculated papers with a purple pen. He sent follow-up notes to the guest speakers and even maintained brief correspondences with a few. It was a happy year, his mind abuzz with theories and ideas. He lamented that he couldn’t live long enough to finish all the papers jousting for attention in his head. Now, though, his charge is to focus, to shape. Not create. Not investigate.

  According to the flyers, next week there will be another onslaught of programs: a roaring seventies feminist will speak to a half-filled auditorium; a prominent professor of history will posit a radical shift in US foreign policy to five ardent graduate students scattered across a lecture hall; wine and cheese will be consumed in a carpeted room here on the basement floor of West Hall, where, instead of discussing the paper just presented by the esteemed visiting Whitman scholar, the professors will gossip about the department chair’s new Lexus. But for Frankie, the ideas might inspire new chapters, new takes, and so he must avoid them.

  Inspiration, Frankie has learned, is the cheapest of the scholar’s tools. Anyone can get charged up by the work of others, but what distinguishes true genius is the ability to sustain a thesis of one’s own conception. His dream and intention is to contribute an enduring, crystalline text to the field of postcolonial studies, something to be read and studied by students as eager as he, ages and ages hence. Why else bother with the stale, endless hours in the library, the liminality, the suspension of normal life?

  And if not now, when?

  Stuck to the bottom of Frankie’s mailbox, as if afraid to assert itself into the cacophony, is an official memo from Dr. Lexus. It’s rare to get such a memo, as they’re issued almost exclusively to announce that some university no one has heard of has offered a tenure-track position to a long-graduated PhD no one remembers.

  This memo is different. Apparently the department has found, or been granted, $15,000 to give away in the form of a fellowship. Rather than divvy up the money into small awards for a handful of worthy graduate students, Dr. Lexus (in his typical all-or-nothing only-the-strong-survive absolutism, which, to everyone’s surprise, has yet to distinguish him in the field of twentieth-century American poetry) will hold a competition to determine the most deserving scholar. Preference will be given to those graduate students who are more than halfway through their dissertation and who would benefit most immediately from the time away from teaching or other “financial pressures.” The fellowship will be based strictly on merit, the first cut made by a panel of the university’s own professors, the final round decided by a visiting judge named Felix Carr, from Princeton. The submission deadline for the first round has been set for next week—“deliberately short notice,” Dr. Lexus explains, “to reward those who have done consistent work and who have something to show for their time”—and the finalists will be notified by Thanksgiving break. The application requires only a cover letter and as much of one’s dissertation as is presentable.

  Frankie has never wanted anything more. Also: he deserves it. Nobody works harder. He has turned down high-paying gigs (SAT and TOEFL prep, tutoring the spoiled daughter of a Saudi prince, bartending) to devote time to this work. A man of immigrant stock, he fully appreciates the decisive stamp of validation, and so will his parents, who, he might remind the committee, came to this country illiterate! Who toiled in factories! Once Frankie wins this, he’ll have his own big announcement to make to his family, his own show-off moment. If he does make it to Italy next August, it will be as a doctor, another American success story coded into the Grasso genes.

  He glances around, as if his fellow grad students—now the Competition—have already begun to mobilize. But there is only the empty hallway, the thin layer of beige carpet frilling at the seams, the muffled voices of office hours behind closed doors, the drone of the fluorescent overheads. He rereads the memo, looking for a clause that might disqualify him, but there is none. He has no excuse. In fact, the fellowship seems designed with him in mind, and he wonders if Birch had a hand in its design, if it was she who convinced Dr. Lexus, with whom she’s always maintained a flirty antagonism, to swing the entire wad of cash toward a student who fits his exact profile. Oh, he could just kiss her!

  Mentally he reviews his credentials. Two of six chapters complete and approved. Eight or nine more chapters in various stages of progress. A clever and potentially groundbreaking but still conclusionless take on Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. The half-formed paper on the gothic and female identity, which he still must find a more elegant way to link to race. The Fanon chunk on which Birch has yet to give feedback, though he’s nudged her twice over cereal. Can any of his colleagues beat that? Ann Highgate’s not even finished her prospectus; Hector Billings has alienated and ditched his third adviser; Steve Doerr has two well-researched but histrionic chapters on the romantics; Chris Curran’s on and off the wagon; and the pregnancies of Mary Kessler keep impeding her progress and prompting her to reimagine her entire project. Who’s left?

  Annalise Theroux, of course. Only Annalise, darling of the theoryheads, with her mod bob and inborn facility with French post-structuralism, poses anything close to a threat. Halfway through her examination of American film noir through a Lacanian lens (or something—Frankie doesn’t quite get it), Annalise may just snatch this prize from his deserving jaws.

  But he can’t concern himself with Mademoiselle Theroux. Not at the moment, at least. He must get home and start crafting the most compelling cover letter in the history of the genre.

  He dashes out the back door of West Hall before anyone sees him. The weather is perfect, as if nature itself won’t let him corrupt the beauty of the day with further thoughts of his theoretical French nemesis. As he climbs the hill to the Great Lawn, he tries to think of a setting more exquisite than this New England college on this particular October morning, but he comes up empty. He’s been to Niagara Falls, Key West, and the California coast, but the stately nostalgia of the university quad remains matchless. Hunched-over trees, backs heavy with history, line the grid of walkways. Perfectly molded bricks, drenched with two hundred years of knowledge
and speculation and failure and triumph, quietly stabilize the buildings. He stops to look, now, as it rings, at the bell tower of the multidenominational house of worship, once an Episcopal church: the black, heavy stone against the brilliant sky. He loves the smoky, stale smell of the falling leaves and the whispers they make as he walks through them. All of it is enough to call forth a thousand innocent childhood hours in his old neighborhood, and the sense that autumn, that season of decay, marks the beginning of all good things.

  Today the quad is thick with flannel blankets on which the undergrads lie, two by two, with books and notes between them, or doze with their backs against the trunks of the elms. He waves to a couple of jocks from his eight thirty, one of whom immediately holds up his textbook to show Frankie he’s doing his homework; the other, in shorts and a tank top despite the weather, his book bag unopened before him, just shrugs and smiles. (Charm and good looks, Frankie wants to tell him, get you only so far.) He watches a girl—a redhead in a formfitting blue fleece—stop a moment in her rush between classes to squint and admire the show of colors. She is as lovely as the landscape, standing there rosy cheeked and awestruck, thinking, maybe, as Frankie is, of the bravery of nature—its choice to sing so magnificently in its final days. What human, Frankie nearly asks this girl, has died with such grace and left, in his going, a gift so grand? Not even his most beloved writers. He can’t name one who comes close.

  His ten-minute walk home takes him down College Avenue, over a bridge, past a coffee shop, a pizza place, two baseball fields, and the new gym, which has been under construction since the spring and may never be finished unless some serious cash is raised. If it mattered more to him, Frankie, who’s never played a sport or cared to, would suggest that the university dispense with athletics altogether and use the money for need-based scholarships and make it a requirement for kids to watch the nightly news or read international newspapers. Teach them who the true heroes are, he would say. Nat Turner, Gandhi, Grandy Nanny. Tell them, If you want the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat, study the Algerian War. The Iliad!