Robert Parker - Love and Glory

So we sat together on the stairs of the Union while outside the campus police awaited the arrival of the Tac cops. The electricity had been shut off to discourage us, but it merely added to the excitement. Looking back now, I marvel at how every step the authorities took to combat the demonstrations added to the fun of the demonstrations, nourished the demonstrators, enriched their opportunity to demonstrate their authenticity, offered them the consolations of martyrdom and simple joys of nonfatal combat.

“This is crazy,” Jennifer said. “You being here. You aren’t committed to this.”

“I’d like to see them stop the war,” I said.

“But that’s not why you’re here.”

“No.”

We spoke in whispers, sitting in the dark with students all around us whispering among themselves, and the smell of grass and cigarettes and humanity seeping around us in the close dark. Through the glass doors of the Union there was movement in the quadrangle, but we couldn’t see of what. There was the familiar revolving flash of the police cars, but they had been there since we’d occupied the building.

In the dimness, close to me, I could see Jennifer shake her head. “I spend more time with you than with my husband,” Jennifer said.

“Yes.”

“He should be here with me.”

“Or you with him,” I said.

“He doesn’t approve of this; he wants to become chairman of the department.”

“His wife’s behavior would have some effect on that,” I said.

“Well, it shouldn’t. I’m who I am, he’s who he is.”

“True,” I said. “But it does. Probably always will.”

“You would say the hell with being chairman.”

“To be with you,” I said.

I could feel her left thigh pressed against mine. Her hip. Her left arm and shoulder. We had to lean close to hear each other’s whispers.

“Are we being silly, Boonie?”

“You and me?”

“No, all of us. All of us who march and protest and occupy buildings and try to change things?”

“No, you’re not silly,” I said. “It’s bound to help. It already has.”

“Sometimes I feel like a jerk,” Jennifer said. “A grown woman marching around with a bunch of kids yelling slogans. John says I should grow up.”

“This is one of the ways,” I said.

“Yes,” Jennifer said. “Yes, it is. John says I am selfish, that I’ve abandoned my responsibilities and been swept up in myself. He says all I care about is being with it.”

“You don’t believe him,” I said.

“Partly. Partly he’s right. I am selfish. I care about myself. Maybe I’m learning to care about myself more than about anything else. Maybe I am caring too much. But I’m finally important. I’m finally involved in the world and people take me seriously. Can you understand that?”

“Sure,” I said. “Among other things, this is a way to be taken seriously. There’s some risk. Risk is the earnest money of conviction. Most of the people in here are after what you’re after.”

“But most of them are kids,” she said.

“So we age more slowly than some,” I said.

“You’re not like me,” Jennifer said. Close to her on the stairs I could see her smile again. “Or the other kids. You don’t need to do this.”

“Not for the same reasons,” I said.

“You do this for me,” Jennifer said. “You grew up a long time ago.”

It was thrilling to talk with her about myself. It was too exciting for me. It threatened my control. But it was irresistible. I wanted her to go on.

“In some ways you’re right,” I said. “I grew up in the years after I bottomed out in L.A., and I had to learn what mattered. I’m clear on that now. I know what I care about. I know what I need to control and what I can control and what I can’t. It’s a kind of freedom.”

Outside, a man with a bullhorn told us we’d have fifteen minutes to clear the building and then we’d be subject to arrest. A stir of near-sexual excitement ran through the kids massed there in the dark.

“What do you need to control, Boonie?”

“Me. My feelings. I feel very strongly. If I don’t keep them clamped all the time, they run to excess. They’re destructive of me and other people. If I combine them with drink, it’s a mess.”

“Humor,” Jennifer said.

“It’s one way,” I said. “It’s a distancing trick. Another way is to stay inside.”

“Inside yourself,” Jennifer said.

“Yes.”

The word passed among the kids in the dark. Link arms. I put my arm through Jennifer’s. The phrase moved through the crowd like the domino effect. Link arms.

“And in college,” Jennifer said. “When I called you and asked you to rescue me from Nick?”

“I took the leash off,” I said. “Or if you prefer a different metaphor, I let you inside.”

In back of us, up the stairs, someone began to sing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” The bullhorn announced ten minutes. The song spread, like the link arms had spread before it, tying people together. Everyone stood.

“And so,” Jennifer was whispering close to me, “when I turned away from you, you took to drinking and the unleashed emotions nearly killed you.”

“Dramatic,” I said.

“There you go, distancing again.”

I nodded.

“I never understood exactly,” Jennifer said. “Maybe I can’t even now. I don’t have the same emotions you do. They’ve never been in need of control, I suppose. Or maybe they’re under such control that it’s a way of life. Either way I never quite understood how betrayed you must have felt.”

The lights came on suddenly. The bullhorn announced, “Five minutes.” Jennifer’s eyes widened as they came on and she thought of something. “Maybe still feel,” she said.

“No,” I said. “I’m beyond that. That way madness lies.”

The crowd inside the Student Union, on its feet, arms linked where possible, singing now lustily, waited in ominous sensuality. Outside the bullhorn sounded again. A bored mechanical voice, “You are trespassing. If you do not leave the premises of the Student Union in two minutes, you will be forcibly removed and subject to arrest.”

The singing grew lustier. Jennifer’s face was bright with excitement. Her hair was beautifully done. Her jewelry expensive, her eyeshadow flawless, her lips were parted and her teeth were very white. Occasionally she rubbed the tip of her tongue on her lower lip. I felt as if I might burst, like the ancient Greek fertility god. But what I felt wasn’t hubris. It was love and it nearly overpowered me.

“When the cops come, stay close to me,” I said.

Jennifer looked at me with the excitement gleaming in her face. “I can take care of myself,” she said.

“I know,” I said. “I was hoping you’d take care of me.”

On a June morning Jennifer and I went to the cellar of the Chapel Building at Taft to dig up our Ph.D.s. The diplomas were in cardboard boxes in which copy-machine paper had originally been shipped. Two undergraduate girls were in charge.

“We’ve come,” I said, “to receive our degrees.”

“Names?” one of the girls said.

We gave them. The girls shuffled through the boxes and found the diplomas, bound in red leather with TAFT UNIVERSITY in gold on the cover. The girl who’d asked for our names brought them to us. As she held them out she rendered a brief excerpt of the traditional graduation march, “Dah, da da da dah da.”

Afterward, holding the diplomas, we walked along the Charles River.

“Think how smart we are now,” I said.

“Yes,” Jennifer said, “dumb no more.”

“Should we celebrate?” I said.

“Yes, we should. I actually am very proud to have done this. When I went to college it was so that I could become educated and marry a man with a white-collar job. An educated woman was more interesting at cocktail parties and having dinner with the boss.”

A college crew swept by on the river, the oars moving in muscular unison, the coach following in a small red speedboat yelling instructions through a megaphone.

“I got my B.A. for somebody else,” Jennifer said. “But the Ph.D. was for me.”

“If nothing else,” I said, “it certifies endurance.”

Jennifer nodded. “It’s more,” she said. “It means I can proceed as Jennifer Grayle instead of Mrs. John Merchent.”

“It’s the way I prefer to think of you,” I said.

She smiled. “The Ph.D. is certification. But in fact, I may have learned more from you, Boonie, than I did from the Ph.D. In a way, you’ve brought me up. I had a chance to see in you things I see in no one else. You remain what you are. You are true to yourself.”

I smiled. Jennifer shook her head impatiently.

“I know that’s a cliché, true to yourself, but I don’t care. You are. You don’t betray what you are because you want something from someone or you are afraid of someone. Most men I know, and women, really do lead lives of quiet desperation. You don’t. Because you don’t I know that it’s possible not to.”

I knew if I pointed it out to her she’d see the irony of that, that she’d remember that my life was a single-minded desperation. But it would have led us to an area we tacitly avoided, an area too uncertain for us, where I, as much as she, feared the terrain and the consequences. So I nodded and shrugged. I knew what she meant. In a sense she was right. My one consuming desperation eliminated all others. Caring only for her, I was free to care about nothing else.

“You taught me by being with me, Boonie, and by being what you are. And by being...” Jennifer seemed briefly to search for the right word. Then she made a small laugh. “I’m so taken with my new intellectual eminence that I’m searching for original phrases. The hell with it. What I mean is that you are completely steadfast. Watching you manifest that has been of more service to me than I can say.”

“This should probably all be saved for Valentine’s Day,” I said. “But I have learned as much from you as you ever did from me. I’ve learned that my definitions, my rules, my certainties, are not universal, that feeling something strongly doesn’t make it right. You are good, and when you do things that I wouldn’t do, they can’t be bad. They can only be different.”

We stopped walking and Jennifer turned toward me and we looked at each other.

“Each of us seems to have been able to offer just what the other needed,” she said.

Beyond the point where we stood the river turned and deepened, flowing under trees that darkened its surface. As the channel narrowed and the water hastened in its rush, twigs that had floated placidly past us began to dance upon the surface, tossed by the compressed energies beneath them.

“Yes,” I said. “I have noticed that too.”

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.