Page 95 of Playworld
“My mom prefers the back of a hairbrush.”
“My dad likes to lift me by the scruff. Like a kitten.” I demonstrated on myself, walking on tiptoes, but without moving the arm Amanda held, a marionetting that made her laugh.
“She used to lock my brother and me in the closet for hours, but thatwas only when we were little. No wonder he asked the judge if he could live with my father.”
We’d entered Columbia’s gates. The three long walkways were made of the same hexagonal paving stones as in Central Park. The paths were tree-lined. Black iron posts connected by black chains fenced off the greenspace. It seemed as if we were passing through a tunnel to a different world, or a city hidden within the city, for we now entered a great expanse whose buildings were of an entirely different architecture. To our right, a long rectangular building was fronted by columns whose facade was engraved with names from my seventh grade class in ancient history:Herodotus, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle.To our left, flanked by a pair of wide flights of stairs, was a domed building in front of which a statue of an enthroned woman with open arms was surrounded by students who sat and talked in the spring-softened evening. I considered this sky, the view of which was unimpeded, its immense breadth somehow even more clearly and discretely framed by these low-slung rooftops.
Someone called out Amanda’s name. It seemed to come from everywhere. On the wide steps surrounding the statue, a man and woman stood and, while Amanda and I waited, walked toward us. Both appeared formally dressed—I said a silent word of thanks to Mom and Dad—Amanda’s father in a bow tie and blue blazer, the woman in a man’s blazer and jeans. But when they drew close, the woman accompanying Amanda’s father was revealed to be someone nearer our age. Amanda’s father so identically resembled her he may as well have been her twin.
After kissing Amanda, he introduced us to Tina Debrovner, “my most talented senior.” If Amanda, dressed and made up thus, seemed costumed as the woman she would one day become, Tina already embodied this. She wore cowboy boots and worn-in bell-bottom jeans, a silver belt buckle with a piece of turquoise at its center, and a brown silk blouse that matched her tweed blazer. Her makeup was light; her chestnut-colored hair and lashes were long; her green eyes flashed. Above her top lip, on its right side, was a mole that, for the first time in my life, conferred luster on the termbeauty mark. Her style seemed fully realized; hercomfort in her person spoke to everything aspirational in the word “adult.” Her hands were pressed into her blazer’s pockets, and she removed one and held it out to Amanda and then me with the total confidence of an elder and none of the condescension of a superior. Amanda’s father then reached out a hand to me and introduced himself as Dr. West. “You must be Rob,” he said.
“Griffin,” I said.
He glanced at Amanda, confused.
“Rob’s at Vassar,” she said, “visiting his sister.”
Dr. West winked at me. “Visiting co-eds is more like it.” Then, to Amanda, whom he’d clearly rocked, said to her, “But maybe they don’t call them that anymore.” He checked his watch. “Let’s head to Butler, shall we? I made a reservation.”
We started walking, Amanda and I behind Dr. West and Tina. To change the subject, I asked, “How was the reading?”
“Wonderful,” Dr. West said.
When I asked who the author was, Tina looked over her shoulder and said, “Shirley Hazzard. Do you know her? She read from her new novel.”
“The Transit of Venus,”Dr. West said. “Which, I’ll add, Tina did not like.”
She rolled her eyes. “I didn’t say I didn’t like it. I just found its style…dense.”
“More likely you’re too young to understand it.”
“I didn’t think it was beyond my comprehension. It was a scene,” she explained to Amanda and me, “when a man and a woman go on a first date together in the English countryside, and he tells her a secret.”
“That’s what happens,” Dr. West cut in, “but it isn’t what’s happening.”
“I’mgettingto the subtext,” she said, and there was ample warmth in her exasperation. “What’s happening is that the man is in love with the woman, but the woman has already decided she can never love this man. That she’ll remain permanently out of his reach and he’ll be permanently reaching toward her, he’ll do anything just to catch a glimpse of her, just like…” She placed her index finger to her chin. “The planet Venus in transit. Does that,” she now said to Dr. West, “sound right?”
“It sounds perfect. Until you get to the end.”
“What I don’t buy,” Tina continued, “is that we have such complete conviction about such things from the word go.”
“That’s because at your age,” Dr. West said, “you still believe you can love things out of people. Or love them into your life.”
“It’s less a question of belief,” Tina said playfully. “I just know you’re wrong.”
“So based on the audience of a single chapter, you’re ready to dismiss the work outright?”
“Yes,” she said.
“That sounds to me like complete conviction. From the word go.”
Tina laughed warmly. “Touché.”
Dr. West turned to me and said, “Tina is a romantic, while I am a realist.”
“What’s wrong with being a romantic?” she said.
“It tends toward the neurotic.”