Love and Glory

Chapter Thirty-Four

I had begun to excerpt small pieces from my journal and polish them and send them out to small intellectual magazines that paid you in free copies. The magazine published several of them and I was encouraged. They were not stories really, they were small, fragmentary set pieces whose meaning, if there was any, resided in the language itself. One reviewer called them sketches and said that my style was “spritely though not without error.”

Jennifer’s doctoral dissertation, Jane Austen and the Function of Being Female, was published, slightly revised, by the Wesleyan University Press and got some rather good reaction in the scholarly journals. Some of the feminist press liked it too, but some found it lacking in doctrinal purity.

“It’s what you get for using big words,” I said. We were having coffee in the faculty section of the Taft student cafeteria. Jennifer smiled.

“I don’t like it, Boonie. I hate being criticized.”

“Who likes it?”

“You’ve had criticism on those sketches you published. You don’t seem to mind.”

I shrugged. “It’s publish or perish,” I said. “If they keep me from perishing, I am willing to take some intellectual abuse in journals of limited circulation.”

“But it must make you angry sometimes, or hurt your feelings.”

“At a low level,” I said. “But not very deeply and not very long. I didn’t write it for them, you know? I like what I write. If you like it too, it’s unanimous.”

She shook her head. Around us the students ate and studied and read The Boston Globe. The smell of coffee and steam-table food dominated the other smells: tobacco, perfume, the disinfectant soap that they mopped the floors with. The noise was mostly boisterous student sounds. Profanity, the current phrases, the occasional blare of a portable radio. The service was mostly Styrofoam and plastic, so there was little of the clatter that you often hear in a cafeteria.

“That would never be enough for me,” Jennifer said. “Just your approval and my own. I need a larger audience. I need to be liked and admired by a lot of people.” She paused and sipped her coffee. “In fact, I tend to get angry at people who don’t like me or people who don’t like what I do. I hate disapproval and I am inclined to take it personally.”

“Forewarned is forearmed,” I said. “I think you’re never wrong.”

“Never?”

“Well, hardly ever. I didn’t fully approve of that Dear John you sent me in Korea.”

A busboy in a white coat pushed a clean-up cart among the tables, cleaning off the napkins and Styrofoam cups and plastic spoons and torn wrappers from sugar and Sweet ’n Low. At our table he stopped and swept our unfinished cups into his plastic trash and wiped the table clean with a damp towel. Jennifer and I looked at each other. The kid moved on, oblivious to us.

“Seemed a little late to protest,” I said.

“Boy’s probably preoccupied with other things,” Jennifer said.

“Musing,” I said, “passionately on the potential for scoring some grass after work.”

I went and got two more cups for us and brought them back to the table. Jennifer was looking at her lecture notes. She had that capacity to work in three-minute bursts if need be, to accomplish something in the smallest of time frames. I couldn’t. I needed long, uninterrupted stretches. She smiled at me when I put the coffee down.

“You know,” she said. “I’m not sure I was wrong to break up with you back then. Isn’t that a lovely quaint phrase from the past? ‘Break up with.’ The person I was might not have been able to do it. I was sort of scared of you. You had so much passion and it was so fierce. You were so moral, so insufferably honorable, so needy. It put a great deal of pressure on me. I wasn’t like that. I’m still not like that. But I’m beginning to be able to feel good about what I am. I’m not like you and I don’t mind. But back then, I don’t know. In secret I felt, maybe I wasn’t even clear on it myself — it’s not my kind of introspection, especially then — that you were a kind of implicit criticism of my own failures.”

I nodded.

“You were — you know this — the first person I ever knew who had a code of behavior. I didn’t even know people had them except in fiction. Real people simply did what they could to get what they wanted. So when I encountered you and you had actual views on right or wrong which were not rooted in being popular or getting a date for the ATO house party, I thought it must be the only code. If I weren’t like you I must be bad.”

“I kind of thought that myself,” I said.

“So if I’d married you I might have been miserable. You might have been miserable too. We might have made each other miserable.”

“I was pretty miserable without marrying you,” I said.

“That’s where those sketches come from, isn’t it?” she said.

“Yes. I kept a journal, and I’ve been mining it.”

“A journal?”

“Yes. All through it. Even entries that I don’t remember making. Thirteen spiral notebooks.”

“When do they stop?”

“They haven’t stopped,” I said. “They are ongoing. They began when you started returning my letters. After a while I started writing and not mailing.”

There was complication in Jennifer’s face. I didn’t recognize all of it, but puzzlement was there, and something stubborn.

“I won’t feel guilty about that,” she said.

I drank some coffee. It had the taste it always had when you’ve drunk too much. It didn’t really taste good. Low-level addiction. Or habit. I wondered if habits were addictive.

“What are you going to do with it, Boonie?”

“The journal?”

Jennifer nodded.

“Eventually,” I said, “I will probably edit it down into a novel, or maybe several. In the meanwhile I will pluck out some quick publications so they’ll give me tenure.”

“I’d like to read it,” Jennifer said. Her coffee grew cold in front of her. It often did. When she became interested in something, anything, it was nearly exclusive. She leaned toward me a little and her wonderful face was serious and interested and thrilling. Her voice was wonderful too, full of unimaginable possibility.

“The whole thing?” I said.

“Yes. It’s not just curiosity. I’m a good editor, maybe I can help.”

“Work on it together?” I said.

“Yes.”

My life’s work, now shared with my life’s purpose. I was flooded with ecstasy. It was hard to breathe except in small, shallow gulps. Art and life unified, or almost. I clenched against the vertigo. Control.

“Sure,” I said. “I’ll bring it in tomorrow.”