chapter ten
“OH GOD, I’M SWEATING,” Larry said, fanning himself in my car. We were on our way to the Huntington Library, and Larry had pointed all the vents toward his face. “Can you crank up the AC?” he begged.
“It’s already up all the way,” I said. “Sorry. Old car.”
“I’ve honestly never felt this way before,” Larry sighed, mopping his brow with a handkerchief. “I’m totally besotted with Jack. I’m just worried he’s going to break things off.”
“Why?”
“He’s worried about his image. Jane Vampire’s his shot at the big time—he doesn’t want to jeopardize it. He warned me we might have to cool things off when the movie premieres and he’s doing wall-to-wall press.”
Larry lifted up his sunglasses and glanced nervously at the rearview mirror.
“Is anyone following us?” he asked.
“No, Larry. I don’t think there are any paps tailing a 2001 Honda Accord.”
“You never know,” Larry said. “I mean, OK, fine. Jack’s kind of B-list right now. I’d say he’s maybe higher on the food chain than the Real Housewives. But if his movie’s a hit? All that’s going to change—there’ll be people stalking him 24/7!”
“You need to stop freaking out,” I said, flashing my reader badge to the security guard at the parking kiosk. “Jack’s clearly into you. I mean, isn’t he risking his career right now, meeting up with you?”
“Maybe he’s a masochist. Maybe I’m a masochist. Ugh, I just can’t stop.”
I pulled into a loading zone in front of the library and hopped out.
“See you in a few hours?” I said as Larry climbed into the driver’s seat. He flashed a peace sign and drove away.
I headed into the library, checked my bags, and made my way to the reading room.
An archivist was ready with my requested documents, presenting me with a large, flat file that she carried in both hands like a tray. Placing it carefully onto my desk, she whispered, “We just catalogued these, Dr. Corey. You’re literally the first person to see them!”
“Are they Brontë’s letters to Monsieur Heger?” I asked. I’d put in a request weeks ago and been waiting impatiently to see them. The archivist smiled and nodded.
I reached for the letters eagerly. For years, they’d been in private hands, preserved by the descendants of Constantin Heger, Brontë’s French tutor and the founder of a school in Brussels where she’d gone to teach in her twenties. Though he was married and had children, Brontë had fallen in love with Heger, writing him as often as twice a week after she returned home. Madame Heger was, predictably, unamused. She instructed Brontë that she could only write twice a year. Undeterred, Brontë continued to send letters, but Heger responded curtly, infrequently, and then not at all. Most of Brontë’s love letters to Heger had been destroyed—burned or tossed out—and the handful that had survived had been sewn back together from scraps retrieved from the trash can. Experts speculated that Monsieur Heger had torn up the letters and his wife had fished them from the garbage.
The letters were sealed in a stiff, clear envelope to prevent further deterioration. I held my breath as I looked at them for the first time. The pages were yellowed with age, spotted with stains, pieced back together like a crossword puzzle. Brontë’s script, demure and even, crossed the page. As I looked more closely, I realized Brontë was writing in French—French because, as she wrote in a short postscript, it was the language “most precious to me because it reminds me of you—I love French for your sake with all my heart and soul.”
I, on the other hand, did not love French with all my heart and soul, but only with enough force of will to pass my PhD language exam. Borrowing a French dictionary from the reference desk, I began, arduously, to translate. For the next few hours, I transcribed Brontë’s letters to my computer, stopping only for a quick bite to eat at lunchtime.
As promised, Larry picked me up a few hours later, honking from the curb in front of the library and startling several tourists and a flock of pigeons.
“You look happy,” I said, sliding into the passenger seat. “How was Jack?”
“Dreamy,” Larry said. “How about you? Did you get a lot of work done?”
“I have to tell you about these letters I just read,” I said. “You’ll die. They’re Brontë’s letters to her tutor Monsieur Heger.”
“Who’s that?”
“Her tutor when she was living in Belgium. She was desperately in love with him, but he was married and had kids.”
“That sounds awfully familiar,” Larry said, looking at me sideways.
“No, no, no—it’s not like you and Jack. Brontë was obsessed with Heger, but he didn’t love her back. She wrote him all these love letters, pretty much spilling her guts to him, and get this—his wife was reading all the letters.”
“Shut. The. Front. Door.”
“I’m serious! And Brontë knew—but she didn’t care! She just kept writing him, even when he didn’t write her back, even when his wife wrote her to say, ‘Cool it.’ Can you imagine? I mean, how incredibly sad is that?”
“Why sad?” Larry asked, his voice turning serious. “She was in love.”
“But I wish she’d just pulled herself together and moved on.”
“Oh, Anne,” Larry said, looking at me fondly. “Haven’t you ever been in love? It makes you do crazy things.”
“But she was old enough to know better!”
“Um, look at me! I’m forty years old and carpooling to LA with my best friend so I can use her car as a decoy to meet my much-younger, married, closeted boyfriend in Best Westerns around the city. I don’t know about you, but that sounds pretty sad, to use your word.”
“Larry!”
“It’s true, though. Isn’t it? I’m a loser. I’m old enough to know better.”
“Larry, stop it. You’re not a loser. You’re a lover. You’re a hopeless romantic.”
“I guess you’re right,” Larry sighed. “I just wish I’d find the right guy.”
“You will,” I said. “I think you’re highly lovable.”
“Thanks,” Larry said, giving me an affectionate shoulder bump. “I think you are, too. And trust me—one day, you’ll fall in love, and you’ll understand what I’m talking about.”
I instantly thought of Adam and felt my ears burning. I didn’t say anything, though, and let Larry ramble on about Jack for the rest of our drive to Fairfax.
*
HAD I BEEN IN love with Adam? At the time, I would have said yes. There was nothing I felt more sure of, no doubt in my mind that what we had was the real thing. Now that I was older, though, I wasn’t so sure. The love letters, the engagement, the heated declarations of love—they all seemed so melodramatic now. In the end, we’d broken up in such a predictable way—on grad night, a final prom-like celebration held in the school gym the night before the commencement.
Adam’s mother had been scheduled to fly in later that night, and he was fretting about whether her plane would be on time, how she would get from the airport to his dorm room, whether she’d agree to take his bed or insist on sleeping on the floor, how she would react to the pomp and circumstance of commencement.
I’d been so consumed with my own family drama that I was hardly listening to him. Lauren was staying in New York with some new boyfriend of hers and taking the train in in the morning. My father had flown in that afternoon, but I hadn’t told Adam, wanting to minimize any interaction between the two. “I’ll see you in the morning,” I told my father over the phone, and he seemed perfectly happy to avoid a strained dinner at Chili’s where he would ask me, once again, to reconsider law school.
“Are you listening to me?” Adam asked as we arrived at the gym, which was festooned with orange and black balloons and fronted by a large, melting ice sculpture that spelled out “2003.” Inside, a DJ was playing cheesy dance music and hordes of drunk soon-to-be grads were milling around the dance floor.
“Uh-huh,” I said, looking around to see if I recognized anyone. The atmosphere felt desperately festive. This was it—the last hurrah, the final bender before all of us were expelled into the real world. Commencement was for the parents, but grad night—grad night was supposed to be for us. Yet already, things had changed. You could sense it in people’s dazed looks, the forced levity in their voices. Parents had flown in by now, siblings and grandparents and other random relatives, and even if they weren’t at the party that night, their presence hung in the air.
“I was saying that I want our parents to meet tomorrow,” Adam said. “Maybe we could meet for brunch right after the ceremony? The Center for Jewish Life does a really nice spread, and I’d like my coworkers to meet my mom. There’ll even be champagne!”
“Yeah,” I said vaguely. “I’ll check with my dad tomorrow. He might want to leave for New York right after the ceremony. God knows my sister will want to get out ASAP.”
“This is important, Anne—when else will they get a chance to meet before we get married?”
“There’ll be plenty of other chances,” I said vaguely. Adam and I had talked of eloping that fall, maybe during one of my planned trips to California. He’d even scoped out San Francisco city hall, excitedly telling me how beautiful the building was, how we could get married under the rotunda at the top of a sweeping staircase. Adam had wanted our immediate families to be there, but I’d convinced him to keep the ceremony intimate—just the two of us. Later, once we’d saved some money, we could host a reception for friends and family.
“I just think this is a perfect time,” Adam was saying. “Everyone’s here.”
“I know, I know. It’s just—my sister’s bringing her new boyfriend along, and you know how difficult she is, and how difficult my dad is, and he’s already complaining about how he doesn’t trust his manager to watch his properties while he’s gone—”
“When did he get in?”
“This afternoon,” I said without thinking.
“He’s here already? Why didn’t you have dinner with him?”
“I wanted to have dinner with you,” I babbled, feeling my face redden. “Besides, he was tired and wanted to turn in early.”
“We could have had dinner together,” Adam said softly. “Why didn’t you tell me he was already in town?”
“It’s no big deal. I just wanted to enjoy our last day together without stressing out about my dad and all—”
Adam was walking around the side of the building, away from the noise of the speakers, away from the throngs of people dipping strawberries in chocolate fountains and shoveling shrimp from the bed of ice beneath the melting ice sculpture. He stopped by an empty bike rack beneath the feeble glow of a lamppost. Nearby, a generator droned loudly, working double time on the sticky June night.
“What’s the matter—Adam, what’s going on?” I said, following him.
His hands were in his pockets, and he was hunched over. I touched his elbow and felt him stiffen.
“Are you mad at me?” I asked. “What did I do?”
Adam turned to look at me. His hair had gotten long, and he brushed it from his eyes as he spoke. He didn’t look angry. He looked sad.
“Are you ashamed of me?” he asked.
“Ashamed? What are you talking about?”
“Not wanting me to have dinner with your father. Not wanting my mother to meet your family. Not telling me things.”
“You’re overreacting, Adam. This has nothing to do with that. This is about me and my screwed-up family! I’m trying to protect you from them!”
Adam didn’t reply. He tipped his head back and took a deep breath, staring at the cloud of gnats hovering around the lamppost. I waited for him to say something, gripped with anxiety. Adam and I never fought. He’d never even raised his voice with me before.
“Your father and sister don’t like me,” he finally said.
“They just don’t know you.”
“And Dr. Russell thinks I’m a distraction.”
“She never said that. She just wants to make sure I don’t make decisions I’ll later regret.”
“I want to make sure you don’t make a decision you’ll later regret.” Adam looked at me, his face questioning, and I felt my stomach turn over queasily.
“Maybe we should take a break,” Adam said.
I felt my eyes fill with tears, but not from sadness. I was furious. “You mean, you want to take a break.”
“That’s not fair,” Adam said. “I’ve tried to make this work all year! I went to Florida with you, I didn’t push you on the engagement, I let you go to Yale—”
“You let me go to Yale?”
“That’s not what I meant,” Adam snapped. “I bent over backwards—”
“You bent over backwards? What about me? I supported you when you suddenly decided you wanted a fancy job instead of going to grad school. I listened to you talk about being wined and dined by those corporate tools. I let you take that job in San Francisco. Don’t talk to me about trying to make it work!”
Adam shook his head. “You think I sold out, don’t you?”
I nodded, angrily wiping the tears from my eyes.
“It’s easy to think that when you’ve never had a real job, Annie.” Before I could interrupt, he added, “Working for your dad doesn’t count. And neither does work-study at the library.”
I felt myself go cold with rage. “So you think I’m spoiled. You think I’m a princess because I’m choosing to be a broke professor instead of selling my soul to some consulting firm? You think that teaching isn’t a real job? God, you sound just like my father!”
“Your father isn’t wrong. You’ve never had to be practical. You’ve never left the ivory tower. You can live a life of the mind because you’ve got a safety net. Your dad, your sister—they might drive you crazy, but they’ll never abandon you.”
“I feel like you’re abandoning me,” I said bleakly. I pulled the cameo ring off my finger. “Here,” I said, handing it to him. “I guess you want this back.”
“No, keep it,” Adam said. “I don’t want it anymore.”
In the distance, I could hear Kool and the Gang’s “Celebration” playing. Someone was smoking pot nearby. Adam said something about keeping in touch and tried to give me a hug, but I pushed him away.
“Go,” I said. “Your mom is probably here by now.”
I turned and walked away. I half expected him to come running after me, to feel his hand on my shoulder and his voice in my ear, apologizing and begging me to stay. But he never came after me, and I was too full of rage and pride to look back. I walked back to my dorm, alone and in the darkness.
*
“ARE YOU DOING OK?” Larry asked, as we pulled off the freeway and drove down the dark streets of Fairfax. “You’ve been awfully quiet.”
“I’m just tired,” I said. “It’s been a long day.”
I arrived home once again to a dark apartment, with no one but Jellyby waiting for me. As I filled her bowl and tried to decide whether to open up a new bottle of wine, my phone buzzed. It was a text message from Rick.
“Are you back yet?” it read.
“Just walked in the door,” I texted back.
“Are you free tonight?”
I paused. “Yes,” I finally typed back. Then, impulsively, I texted, “Want to come over for a drink?”
“Be there in ten,” Rick texted back immediately. “I’ll bring over some snacks.”
I settled onto my couch, looking forward to seeing Rick despite my low mood. Our relationship was so easy and uncomplicated. Rick was attractive, funny, and smart. He was great in bed. He was there when I wanted company, but he didn’t crowd me.
Maybe it wasn’t full-blown, tempestuous love—at least, not yet—but that was OK with me. I wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice. I didn’t want to prostrate myself to another person, didn’t want to suffer like I had in the past. Let Larry and Brontë wallow in their lovesickness. I was done.