The St. Ambrose School for Girls(64)

But he’s definitely starved for real conversation, and, his collection of popular works aside, he does have good insights. He really does. And he honestly cares about what I have to say. My ability to recall passages word for word, to synthesize plot into theme, to defend my perspectives, seems to captivate him. I feel sometimes that he’s testing me, although not to trip me up. He wants to feel out where my intellectual end points are, and the more he’s unable to find them, the more fascinating I become to him.

That this spectacular man, who is worshipped by so many, chooses to seek me out sustains me to such a degree that my madness has gone blissfully quiet, cowed by my focus on him. The retreat of my disease in deference to Nick Hollis is the very best gift that my brain has ever given me, and it suggests my mother’s purpose in sending me here to Ambrose is being well served. This connection, these conversations, would never have happened in my small town.

And he’s had another magical effect. Greta has been leaving me alone. In fact, I haven’t really seen her much around the dorm or elsewhere. All of her tormenting, along with my fantasies of being her undertaker, feels like the distant past.

I did not give her what she wanted so she moved on.

Or maybe Nick Hollis is a talisman that has recalibrated my whole life.

The church bells start to ring six o’clock, and I close his book.

I am tired. I spent the day on my hands and knees, washing all the woodwork on the first floor with hot water and Murphy Oil Soap. I’ll do the same tomorrow down my hall and should finish upstairs by noon on Monday. I’m earning five dollars an hour and cannot guess whether this is charity in the guise of a job or if any of the elbow grease is in fact necessary to the functioning of the dorm or the school. Whatever the case, I’m grateful for the money I’m earning. It’ll cover the co-pays on my prescription, something that’s necessary as I’m taking my lithium scrupulously as directed.

As I watch my pill supply dwindle in its little orange bottle, I find myself looking forward to my next interaction with Phil the Pharmacist. I’m doing so much better. I can’t fathom a return to the depths that took me to his CVS, to the boiler room plan, to my almost-grave. It’s like with Greta’s aggression. All of my angst and my disease seem like a dreamscape I’ve woken up out of. History has certainly proven that this current mental stability should not be trusted, and yet that’s a hard truism to remember now that my daily routine is so… well, normal.

On that note, I’ve got laundry to do.

I take Nick’s book with me along with my bag of dirties, and as I approach the main staircase, I slow down just in case there’s an opportunity to cross paths with him. In my mind, I see him opening his door right as I come up to his apartment. He smiles and says that he was coming to look for me anyway. He’s cooked too much spaghetti for himself, as his wife was supposed to be back but has been delayed by bad weather in Minnesota. He’d like to know if I can join him? I say yes, of course, even though I already ate my brown-box dinner at Wycliffe an hour ago, a fact I do not share with him because this is a realistic fantasy, not a hallucination, and I would lie like that in real life just to spend time with him. I tell him I’ve got to start my laundry downstairs first, and he tells me he will get my place setting ready. When I come back, his door is open, and there’s a lit candle on his little table. We talk until three in the morning about books, and before I go back to my room, there is a meaningful pause as our eyes meet in the doorway at my departure.

In that moment, he communicates wordlessly that he wants to kiss me. In that moment, I communicate wordlessly that I want him to kiss me. We stand there like a pair of Victorians, kept apart by student/teacher propriety, his wedding ring, and the distance of our ages. Even though grown-up lust simmers below our surface, we respect the boundaries that we must not, and will not, cross, because we are two righteous, principled people who would never violate such strictures.

And the recognition of this shared and indelible self-control is part of our attraction.

This vital exchange, as powerful as it is silent, alters everything and nothing at all. As fall turns to winter, and winter warms to spring, we continue our connection on an intellectual plane. When he goes off to Yale for that PhD, he writes to me. I write back to him. Our ties deepen as I enter college. Finally, I’m of age, and he and Sandra split up because she’s never around. Nick’s and my relationship is consummated in a blaze of passion. We marry the June after I graduate as an English major from Yale. We live a life full of books and learning, our conversations what we nurture, no noisy children interrupting the literature that brought us together and sustains us still. He dies first. It’s quick. He barely manages to tell me he loves me one last time before his heart stops. I linger for exactly three more years, limping along, half of me gone, and yet I must step into his shoes to usher the last class of freshmen he taught through their senior thesis. Upon their graduation, my job done, I graduate to the other side, where I meet him again in the company of angels in heaven—

Wait, am I actually getting religious here?

That man truly has transformed me.

Back in the real reality, I stare at Nick’s closed door for a little longer, to see if he comes out, to see if we can jump-start my spaghetti fantasy into action. When nothing happens and I hear no sounds inside his apartment, I’m crushed, sure as if we had a date and he stood me up.