"Young idiot," said Nick. "More college students are killed in bicycle accidents than commit suicide from despair."
"That's not true."
"No, probably not."
"How many do commit suicide from despair?" said Janet, thinking of pink curtains and Nora's PDR.
"I don't keep count," said Nick, rather shortly.
They crossed the road themselves and took the steep path, made gloomy by a collection of gigantic larches. Janet kept an eye out for an overturned cyclist, but the maniac seemed to have passed safely through.
"I used to roller-skate down this hill," she said. "Before they put that new concrete bridge in."
She was used to a certain degree of wonder in response to this remark about roller-skating, but Nick said only, "It was a wooden one before; I remember."
They crossed the new bridge.
"Yes," said Janet. "We've come the wrong way, we're going to end up in the Lower Arb."
"No, I just wanted to go the long way around; I've got a friend in the woods here."
They took the curved path in between Dunbar and the lake; Janet had taken it in the other direction on her walk yesterday.
On the spot where she had met the Californian and the southerner, Nick stopped and made a chittering noise between his teeth. He was answered from a spindly elm tree, and after a moment a squirrel came headfirst down its trunk, stopped at eye level, and considered Nick with interest. He dug a tattered heel of brown bread out of his back pocket, reminding Janet of Molly's ID card, and held it out. The squirrel stretched its neck like a goose and nibbled rapidly until most of the bread was gone, then snatched the remaining piece and bolted back up the tree, flirting its tail as they all did.
"Did you ever try them on apples?" said Janet.
Nick had already started walking again, and he did not turn around for this question.
"They're fussy," he said. "Spoiled, I suppose." Janet caught up with him, and he started.
"Sorry," he said.
"It's all right," said Janet.
They turned off the sidewalk just before the wooden bridge, crossed a small meadow of goldenrod on a dusty path, and passed into the green shade of the woods. The Upper Arboretum suffered a certain amount of maintenance every year, though nobody had ever gotten the College Council to agree to spray the poison ivy. The path they walked on was broad and partially graveled. On their right, the low banks of the stream had been shored up here and there with railroad ties and large flat stones, to prevent the stream's natural tendency to spread out through the woods and convert them to marshland. The artificial lakes were also evidencing a tendency to silt up and turn into marsh; this was hailed with delight by the Biology Department and with dismay by almost e verybody else, and was at
present a matter of hot dispute.
"Do you think they should dredge the lakes?" said Janet to Nick's back. His shirt was sticking to it; he looked to be mostly bones.
"Certainly they should," said Nick. "If they want a marsh, they can go out to Rice Lake. Our lakes are manmade, and they should stay made."
"My father thinks so too," said Janet. "My mother says that when nature takes hold so aggressively, you should let it have its way."
"I'll wager she didn't say so the last time you had ants," said Nick.
"No—she put mint all over the kitchen counters and the windowsills and the threshold." Nick turned around and leaned on an oak tree. With eyes like his, he would always look a little startled. "And why did she do that?"
"She'd read it repelled ants."
"And did it?"
"Somewhat. There weren't as many of them. But it made it hard to cook dinner, and everything seemed to end up with mint in it."
"She should have recited the rhyme," said Nick.
"What?"
"There's a rhyme that goes with all these herbal remedies. 'Breathe, breathe, thou merry mint, until I may see nary an ant.'"
"You've got to be kidding," said Janet cautiously.
Nick grinned at her, and the bottom fell out of her stomach. "If you say it, lady," he said. "Let's go a little farther; I know where there are Indian paintbrushes blooming still."
He did, too. Janet had assumed he was mistaking bee balm or maybe even Indian blanket, which was supposed to stop blooming in July but often did not, for Indian paintbrush. But a little farther along the path was a round space where the stream made a loop. Three ailing willows had been removed from it this summer, and it was a meadow of grass and flowers. Next year the brambles would take it, but now it blazed with goldenrod, Devil's paintbrush, the luminous blue of chicory, and the biggest Indian paintbrush flowers Janet had ever seen.
"There," said Nick, with great satisfaction, as if he had planted them all himself.
He moved lightly through the knee-high grasses, picked one of the bright yellow flowers with their bristling red tips, and held it up to Janet, who had followed him.
The meadow still smelled of summer, dust and baking grass and greenness.
"Just matches your hair," said Nick.
"It does not; it clashes. Try the hawkweed."
"The Devil's paintbrush? Oh, no, lady, not that one. Here, look." He tucked the flower behind her right ear. He smelled like sage. "Now, see?"
"How can I see?"
"I'll be your mirror," said Nick.
His eyes were enormous. Janet tilted her head the small amount necessary to look squarely at him, meaning to make some sharp remark; and he kissed her. He took his time about it, and unlike Danny Chin he seemed to have had some practice. This—or something—made a remarkable difference in the entire sensation. Janet was wondering in an abstracted sort of way about how long her knees were going to hold out when Nick moved his mouth about half an inch from hers and said, very softly,
"'Underfoot the violet, crocus, and hyacinth with rich inlay 'broidered the ground, more colored than with stones of costliest emblem.'"
Janet did not know the poem, which, she thought later, must have been the reason that, instead of melting, she thought with awful clarity, oh, no, I'm not lying down in the flowers with somebody I don't know well enough to talk about contraception with.
Nick, as if he had heard her, pulled back a little farther and smiled beatifically.
"There, that's over," he said.
"I beg your pardon?" said Janet, in the tone of one who thinks the party addressed should be begging hers instead.
"The first kiss," said Nick, cheerfully. "Always best to get that one out of the way—it's so awkward."
Janet thought of Danny Chin, and chuckled. "Come on," she said, and took Nick's hand. The sensation was peculiar. She remembered taking her mother's or father's hand when she was small; she remembered taking Andrew's hand as recently as last month.
(Lily-Milly was a standoffish child who wouldn't even hug you on your birthday.) That was family—but what was this? She cleared her throat. "I'll show you a place that's unprepossessing, now, but every spring it's covered with bloodroot. We can come back past the tennis courts and the house I'm going to buy after I get my Ph.D. and come to teach at Blackstock, and that'll get you to the Women's Center a little early for your appointment."
"Lead on, MacDuff," said Nick. Janet started to correct him, and thought better of it.
Standing between Eliot and the Women's Center after Nick had gone into the latter, Janet considered and rejected lunch, company, and another walk. She was still, now that the momentary excitement had passed, in a fever after the lecture this morning. She would go to the library and get a jump on all her classmates, who would have made the fatal calculation that two weeks is a long time.
The library was a square, flat building of yellow brick, built into the side of the hill that Masters Hall sat at the top of. The library was one story tall in front, and looked, between Masters and the even more gargantuan brick bulk of the old Chemistry building, as if somebody had stepped on it. But down the hill behind, it sank for four stories, packed with books, crammed with
knowledge; and scattered with odd cushions and strange padded built-in furniture added a few years ago to placate the rioting students of the time, who could never seem to make up their minds whether they were angriest about Viet Nam, about being made to learn a foreign language, or about being made to sit at a hard wooden desk while they did it. The College, being unable to do anything about Viet Nam and unwilling to do anything about the language requirement, had reformed the furniture in the library.
Janet pushed through the revolving glass doors, strode through the stark lobby with its Klee prints, turned right to the warped wooden counter that guarded the Reserve books, and asked for The Romance of the Rose, reserved for Professor Evans's English 10 class.
The young man behind the desk shoved his glasses up his short nose and looked sheepish.
The expression didn't suit him; he was pale and dark-haired and ethereal, like a romantic vampire, an impression that his open-necked white shirt and mellow voice did nothing to dissipate. Janet wondered if there had been some gigantic influx of Theater majors this year. That department did not usually have many majors.
"I just this minute gave out the last copy," the young man said. He gestured over his shoulder; Janet turned, and saw Miss Zimmerman bending her sleek yellow head over a huge folio volume. She seemed to be concentrating on the illustrations.
"Well," said Janet, "how long has she got it for?"
"Till three. The first one's due back at one and the other one at two-thirty."
Janet grimaced; the young man said, "Okay, look. There's one more copy. Professor Evans wouldn't let us put it on Reserve. It's about a hundred years old and he doesn't think we should be allowed to put our grubby fingers on it at all. Here's the call number."
"Well, thank you," said Janet, startled. "But—"
"Don't check it out and lose it, that's all."
"Okay, but—"
"Shall I say I have a weakness for redheads?"
"No, please don't," said Janet, and beat a hasty retreat. The number on the slip of paper he had handed her led her down to the bottom floor of the library, to be absorbed among the Close Rolls and the Patent Rolls and other large and improbable collections of historical documents. She passed these, and wandered, head tilted at the angle that always gave her a headache, past a flurry of French titles and a flurry of Latin ones, and bumped with alarming violence into somebody—or more precisely, into a corner of the huge book he was holding.
"What the hell are you doing?" said the possessor of the book, in a voice not at all suited to a library.
For heaven's sake, thought Janet, looking up the considerable distance to his face, it's another one of them. This place is haunted by beautiful young men with lovely voices. She rubbed her forehead and said, "Excuse me."
"Yes, all right, watch where you're going."
"Could you move out of my way, please? You're standing right where—oh. You've got the book I want."
"What could you possibly want with this?"
"I'm a student," said Janet, sweetly. "Do you want to see my ID card?"
"Go find one of the nice translations, there's a good girl."
You keep a civil tongue in your head, there's a good boy, thought Janet. She took a deep breath. "Are you going to check it out?"
"Of course not."
Lovely voice, dreadful temperament. Any rational person would walk away from him and go reserve one of the nice translations for later this afternoon. But why should he get away with being so rude? Because he had gorgeous gray eyes and yellow hair and a thin, thoughtful face? Nonsense.
"How long will you be using it, then?"
He rolled the gorgeous gray eyes at the ceiling and said through his white, white teeth,
"What fucking difference does it make to you? I've got it; go away."
"Is this a nasty translation?"
"What?"
"As opposed to the nice ones?"
The young man made a noise in his throat that was just short of a growl. "How old are you?"
"Eighteen," said Janet, startled into the simple truth.
"If you want to live to be nineteen," said her antagonist, "go away."
Janet burst out laughing; this was really too much; neither of them was acting a day over twelve. From a little distance away, where the carrels were ranged under the windows, a harried voice hissed, "Shut up!" Janet could not stop laughing, and did not, in fact, greatly want to. She leaned on the cold metal shelf and chortled until the young man, who had turned very red, held the book out at arm's length, opened his long brown hands, and strode around the end of the stack before the book hit the floor. It did so with a resounding flat smack, like a car backfiring. The harried voice, now much louder and clearly female, burst into furious expostulation. The young man's voice, answering it in standard college terminology, echoed like that of somebody playing a madman in the theater.
Janet snatched up the book and ran for the stairs. When she returned the book to its place at four o'clock, there was nobody on the lowest level of the library at all. Janet had a headache, partly from the poem, which she devoutly hoped Evans was going to explain to them, or she was doomed from the start, and partly from the fact that she had had no lunch.
Nick's abduction by sword of the bust of Schiller was scheduled for five. Janet crept up the broad, well-lit stairways of the library as if she expected people to materialize out of the cinder-block walls at her, scooted through the deserted lobby, and emerged blinking into a much stronger sunlight than the earlier part of the day had suggested. She lingered on the sidewalk that led to the library, checking for the presence of tall, beautiful young men with foul tempers.
She wished she had not forced the encounter with the mad Theater major. He had been rude, and had deserved some rudeness in return; but she was not pleased with her own part in the conversation, which felt in retrospect more like flirtation than reprimand. What had been the matter with him, though? It was much too early for people to be burning out on their studies and turning obstreperous. Of course, if he'd been standing there for some time, trying to read that damn poem, then almost any wild behavior could probably be excused.
As she crossed the campus, the figures of the poem were still in her mind—the precise walled garden; the red roses; the one half-open flower that the poet had, God knew why, set his heart on; the flat, formal characters with their peculiar names: Jalosie, Amis, Biautez, Reason, Bialacoil, Franchise, Pite. All harping on the rose, one rosebud in a garden full of the flowers. Janet's mind's ear presented to her her mother's voice, in the Scottish accent she remembered from Janet's great-grandmother, reading Burns on a winter's evening when the power was out.
"My luve is like a red, red rose That's newly sprung in June."
"Oh," said Janet, stopping short under one of the remaining elm trees. "It's inside out, that's what it is." Those weren't characters at all, they were attributes of the heroine; the rosebud was, not her sled, but her love, or maybe something a little more specific than that. It would be interesting to see how Evans dealt with that, given a
classroom full of adolescents whose instinctive dimwitted responses to the mention of sex did not seem to have been altered in the least by the sexual revolution, their own intelligence, or anything else.
Janet started walking again, more slowly. The entire elegant intent of the poem unfolded itself in her mind like—well, like a flower. It wasn't what she would call fiction at all; it wasn't what she would call poetry, either, exhibiting, even in the lively Medeous translation, a dampening inclination to get on with the story—which wasn't a story, really, but the inside occurrences for which, in most love stories, you would see only the outside manifestations. Was that what they meant by allegory? It was going to be a long time until Evans's lecture on this poem, she could see that already.
She wondered how much of it Nick might make pass quickly.
There was a little clump of students loitering outside the main doors to Chester Hall, including Robin Armin and the
young man from behind the Reserve Desk. An ethereal blonde who might have been the one Janet had discussed squirrels with was hanging around Robin's neck. Janet marched up to them anyway.
Mercifully, Robin grinned and said, "Nick let you in on it, too, did he?"
"Foolish boy," said Janet, rather put out. "Doesn't he know how news spreads around here? He's probably got at least two Benfield adherents in with his loyalists."
"Well, and where would be the fun if he hadn't?" said the girl.
"Oh," said Robin. "Janet Carter, this is Anne Beauvais. Freshman undecided, junior Classics."
The tall girl unwound her arms from around Robin and said to Janet, "What are you hesitating among?"
"English, English, and English," said Janet. Anne Beauvais raised an eyebrow.
"Well," said Janet, "I did vaguely consider a special major with a lot of different languages in it, but it takes four terms before you get to the interesting literature, and I haven't read most of what's been written in my own language, so I'll probably just stick to that."
"Not in Classics," said Anne, coming around Robin. She was wearing a short green dress in crinkle gauze that, most unlike that material's usual behavior, clung to her and revealed that, without much doubt, she was very muscular and had no use for underwear. Janet feared for Molly's chances.
"In Classics," said Anne, fixing Janet with a stern, pale eye, "you read Xenophon in Greek I and Herodotus in Greek II, and you read Cicero in Latin I and Virgil in Latin II. It's the immersion method they used to try with the modern languages, except the students rebelled."
"And Classics students don't?"
"Have you met Medeous yet?"
"Not in person," said Janet, considerably startled. "I've read her translation of
The Romance of the Rose. "
Anne and Robin looked at each other. There was a moment of sudden and curious tension; then, as if he were offering a theory for examination, Robin said, "That must have been her grandmother."
"Yes, of course, how stupid of me," said Janet, laughing. "The date on that book was 1887."