Returning to the present, I look down to my lap. As I sit on my bed, leaning back against the bare wall behind me, I have another book of Nick’s in my hands. It is The Plains of Passage by Jean M. Auel. It’s part of a series and a novel that, I gather, has sold very well. I’m interested in, but not gripped by, the content and prose, and I find myself curious as to why Nick has read the novel and is keeping it. It’s kind of pedestrian, for entertainment rather than depth, and there are other books on his shelves that go to this populist vein. What’s more, and this surprises me, he’s written notes in the margins, keeping track of the plot, which strikes me as wholly unnecessary. But maybe he’s practicing his skills as an editor, honing things so that his fallback to being an English professor is strong.
Although if you’re in your early twenties and your father is still paying your school bills, how much of a fallback do you need?
The idea Nick could be anything less than the intellectual titan I’ve made him out to be fills me with a strange dread. Because he is wonderful and he is smart, and I can make these declarations because I now feel as though I know the man. In the last couple of weeks, I’ve been going in and out of his apartment regularly, and he visits me as well, like stopping by to share the New York Times best-seller list with me this past Sunday afternoon, and on Wednesday coming to see what I thought about Auel’s work so far.
Courtesy of our relationship—friendship, I mean—I’ve totally restructured my college trajectory. Previously drawn to math and science, I now pay extra attention in my English classes, and I’ve decided I’m now going to be a literature major for undergrad, go on to Yale to get my master’s, and then finish up inside those ivy walls with my doctorate.
After which, I will end up teaching wherever he does.
Oh, and I’m not like Ms. Crenshaw, on a solo mission monitoring the windows in his pale blue Porsche. These works of fiction that Nick and I discuss and dissect are a two-way street. We both talk. We both ask questions. We both listen to each other’s opinions and care about what they are. And people are noticing. The girls in Tellmer were confused at first, shooting curious looks in my direction as I knocked with growing confidence on his door, and then, when he began to seek me out, jealousy entered their eyes. Misfits are not supposed to ascend. They’re supposed to stay put underfoot, to be trod upon at leisure. But my peers’ issues with me are not my problem, nor do I give it much thought. I’m only interested in developing my relation—my friendship with Nick.
In truth, I sense that he’s lonely with his wife being gone so much, and I also feel that he’s lost in this sea of teenage girls who find him attractive and dote on him. On his side, he treats them all like little sisters, bundles of charming energy he must safeguard, and now that I know him so much better, I am certain that whatever anything with Greta looked like, nothing untoward was going on. In all our interactions, never, not once, has he ever done or suggested anything inappropriate, and I get the solid sense that it’s not about who I am. It’s about who he is. It’s such a relief not to worry that he’s capable of things that are wrong.
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.