Part 1 (2/2)

Kate Scott, Samuel Blake, and Mark Rios sat together for two hours, as sunlight moved across the walls, and coffee cooled, and the first students to brave the day began to show their sleep-filled faces. Outside the dining hall, before they parted on the path, Samuel asked Kate if she'd be interested in coming to one or two of his lectures. Maybe she'd even consider guest-lecturing on her own idea sometime. Kate said she wasn't sure, and Samuel put his warm hand on her arm and said, ”Just come, then. Come and see what you think.”

As Samuel walked away, Kate could feel Mark thrilling beside her. All he said was ”I guess you've met your match. Doesn't even ask you out. Invites you to a lecture.”

And so her courts.h.i.+p with Samuel began. They spoke about ideas: hers, his, those of the great minds of literature and history. They kissed, and they hiked together on Sat.u.r.day afternoons, and Kate spent less time alone with books about the Virgin Mary. Soon Kate and Samuel were having easy, good s.e.x and spending nearly every night wound around each other in Samuel's queen-size bed. Kate could feel, as spring swelled, a rush of good feeling inside herself, a new hope, a loosening. It was as if she were unpacking her vital organs out of a deep freeze. She found herself unable to remember the last full day she'd spent in the library. She surprised even herself when she asked the seminar she taught if they'd be up for holding cla.s.s outside, under the blossoming cherry tree, on the first bright day of spring. Meanwhile, Kate visited Samuel's lectures and listened as his voice lilted up to her in the back of the lecture hall. Being pulled into Samuel's world made her body warm. She pretended she was visiting a different life. Samuel Blake kept the reality of Marcus Berger's letter, lingering in Kate's desk drawer, at bay.

A late April breeze s.h.i.+vered across the lake as Kate Scott and Samuel Blake walked at the edge of the water, almost holding hands, on an evening that would surely end in lovemaking. Not just s.e.x but lovemaking, something new. Kate knew that what she wanted now from this man was lovemaking, and yet some dark glimmer in the back of her mind told her she wasn't prepared, wasn't worthy of what could come. Maybe giving her whole self to the act of s.e.x would be crossing an irreversible, invisible line. She'd have to reveal truths she hadn't shared even with Mark, revisit a past she'd hidden from herself.

She pulled her attention to what Samuel was saying about his stepmother's intrusion into the family. Samuel and his brother had been brutal. ”I can't believe she endured us,” he said.

”She obviously loved your father, Samuel.”

He stopped walking. ”Why do you always call me Samuel?”

She laughed and started walking again, forcing him to catch up. ”That's your name, isn't it?”

”Technically, yes. But you've heard people; they call me Sam all the time.”

”Yes, but Samuel has a ring to it. Samuel is beautiful to say, to hold on your tongue.” She felt herself smiling at the literal interpretation of her words.

Samuel laughed. ”I've never heard it put that way. I like it when you call me Samuel.” He put his arm around her, making a warm bubble around their two bodies. ”I just don't think I've ever heard someone so determined to say my name before.”

”I suppose names just matter a lot to me. They're powerful.”

They walked in silence, the crunch of gravel under their shoes, until Samuel's voice filled the air. ”And what about you?”

”My name? Oh, very boring. Just Kate Scott. Kate short for Katharine. With two A's.” She almost added, ”Because I liked that spelling,” then caught herself. People didn't name themselves.

Samuel stopped walking and turned to face her. ”You're beautiful,” he said, brus.h.i.+ng her hair off her shoulder, and it was this simple clarity, this truth he could share with her, that made Kate want him in her bed.

They were in Kate's bedroom now and they were kissing. He was still wearing his tweed jacket, and the rough of it was harsh through her blouse. It smelled of him, tinged with a trace of cinnamon and rain, and it made a soft scratching sound between them as they kissed. The kissing was soft and familiar. She knew his tongue already, the warm hush of his mouth as it opened on her lips, the bright smoothness of his teeth.

Samuel looked up and laughed. ”I feel like a kid again. In a dorm room with a beautiful girl. About to do something.”

”Standard issue,” she joked, knowing he felt the s.h.i.+ft too, felt the knowledge that this time their s.e.x would feed more than just their bodies. Not just because she'd finally invited him to spend the night at her place; they both knew it was more. Kate gestured grandly around her small dorm apartment. ”I figured I was a perfect fit for a house fellow. I'm schoolmarmish, able to make really good brownies for study breaks, and I'm not someone who needs a lot of sleep.”

”That's really why you live here?”

”Well.” His hands were warm on her back. ”I like the students. It sounds strange, but I like the noises they make. Their racket keeps me from feeling lonely.” Samuel nodded. Kate was surprised at her honesty with this man, and further surprised that her liking the noises made sense to him. Everyone else, including Mark, thought she was insane for wanting to live in the middle of a dorm, surrounded on all sides by eighteen-year-olds.

Now Samuel was walking to the head of the bed. He pointed to the poster hanging above it and looked closely, blinking in the shadows of the room.

”Mark brought it back to me from a conference in New Orleans,” Kate said. ”He said it reminded him of me.” The poster was a photograph of an African statue, a female nude outlined from the side. She was curved, with hips and b.r.e.a.s.t.s and thighs and wide arms. Kate found herself considering the poster from Samuel's point of view, and of course the woman looked nothing like her. But she'd known what Mark had meant when he'd given it to her. He'd meant that this woman was brave and alone, fierce in the world. Kate had so appreciated what it said about Mark's understanding of her that she'd framed the poster and kept it over her bed so she could sleep under it every night. The woman was a dream, an aspiration. She heard herself say: ”It's funny, you know? Because he was right. I look at it, and it helps me remember not just who I want to be but who I am. How to be.”

Samuel smiled at her and said, ”Do you mind if I do something strange without explaining myself?”

She looked at the bed and said, ”Well, it depends on how strange it is.”

For the first time she saw Samuel flash with embarra.s.sment. ”No no no oh G.o.d no!” He laughed. ”I should watch how I phrase things. No, I just mean about her,” and he pointed at the poster.

”Sure.”

He shrugged his jacket off his shoulders, then brought it in front of him, opening it with both hands as he leaned over the bed to reach to the top of the poster. He tucked his jacket over the top of the frame, draping and shrouding the African woman.

”Don't I even get to ask?” she managed after a moment.

”Come to my lecture tomorrow and all will be explained,” he said as he reached toward her. ”You know where it is. Evans 206. Two P.M.” He pulled her onto the bed, and from that moment on, there would only ever be a before and an after.

THE FIRST TIME I EVER KNOW what a picture is is when Myla shows me a picture of our mom. She tells me stories about Mom and how she flies and looks in our window at night and makes sure we won't die or injure our persons. But this time Myla reaches up to the picture on the piano and puts the frame on the ground and opens up the back and pulls out just the plain photo and says, ”Pru. You know what this picture means?” and of course I don't know. So I say no and she says, ”It means Mom was real once. Only three years ago, before the car accident, she was here. You were just a newborn,” she says, ”but I was five years old and I remember her. And this picture remembers her. It means she was real. It means she lived on this earth.” Then she points to this poster we have in our living room. ”And that painting means the painter was real. Monet, the guy who painted that picture? He saw those lily pads on his pond and in his head and wanted to make them real, so he painted them. But they weren't art before that.” Then she holds up the picture of our mom. I want to kiss it, but Myla says I'll have to wait until it's back under gla.s.s before I do that. ”You'll ruin it,” she says. ”You have to realize it's precious. Once this picture goes away, then she's gone. Then the proof of her is missing.” Even though I'm so little that I don't even know what ”proof” means, I know what she's saying is serious. Proof is a good thing to have. And pictures can give it.

ON THE PHONE THE NEXT DAY, Kate gave Mark the usual update, stopping short, as always, before providing the salacious details he craved. She also held back on the way things had changed, about the newness she and Samuel had made together. Even explaining about the jacket, about the way Samuel had placed it over the poster, sounded silly. She didn't know how to tell Mark that she knew it was an important thing to do, even if she didn't know what it meant, or why Samuel had done it.

”So, coffee? This afternoon?”

”I can't,” said Kate. She could practically hear Mark's eye roll over the phone.

”Another Professor Blake lecture, I presume?” he said, unable to hide his hurt.

”Yeah.”

”Yeah.” Mark paused. ”I should have made you guys sign a contract promising that once you started doing whatever it is you're doing, it wouldn't disrupt my normal schedule. I mean, I have needs too.”

”How about dinner?”

”You sure you don't have plans with the Professor of Love?”

”I'm sure. I'll come over. We'll reinstate movie night. I promise.”

Kate hung up and got off the bed, where she'd been sitting since Samuel had gone. Growing aware of the time, she went into the bathroom and brushed her hair in front of the mirror, examining her face. More than once Mark had commented on her natural aversion to mirrors, to the fact that the only one hanging in her apartment was here, built in to the cabinet. She hid the real reason for such omission: her face was a shock to her each time she saw it. It was a shock because it was her, the her that was the carryover from everything else. And yes, it was beautiful. There was no denying it. Her body had changed with age; she'd become curved, and her hair had been long and short and long and short in the interim, but her wide eyes, the scooped bridge of her nose, her lips that pinked when she bit them, the freckles dappling her cheeks, all that was the same. When she thought about her looks, it seemed strange that no one ever recognized her; apparently people were willing to believe what they were told before they'd trust their own eyes.

She opened the cabinet and traded her reflection for a collection of lotions and creams. She'd cut her fingernails, and that would give her just about enough time to make it to Evans 206 by 1:55.

Inside Evans, her heels clipped down the echoing hallway and made her sound adult. They sounded authoritative, the way she thought she must look from the outside. Kate Scott Kate Scott Kate Scott, they beat out.

The lecture hall was old-fas.h.i.+oned, a relic from the early days when the college had devoted itself to nurturing the young minds of aristocratic women. Kate had taken to entering at the back, so she could look down on the heads of all the students as they settled in. They clapped down the wooden chairs before they sat, oblivious at first to Samuel's presence at the head of the room, where he was waiting for their eyes. The room buzzed with sound and movement: the swish and scratch of jackets being stuffed under chairs, the crackle of gum being unwrapped, the pock of pens being uncapped, the unzipping of bags, the thump of books on the terraced floor.

Samuel flipped off the lights, and simultaneously a projector burst bright light against a screen at the front of the room. In the first of Samuel's lectures Kate had attended, she'd noted with jealousy the presence of a teaching a.s.sistant. Not only did TAs diminish the paper-grading load, they also undertook such mundanities as the turning on of projectors, a task Kate always had to figure out on her own. She'd suffered through more than one embarra.s.sing disaster with in-cla.s.s slide shows.

Kate could make out Samuel's sharp shadow cast on the screen, and as he walked toward the cla.s.s, his shadow grew larger and less distinct. Then he sat. She found an aisle seat in the top row and sat as well, glad for the darkness. The whir of the projector contributed to the warmth and safety of the room. She looked to her left and watched the spotlight growing from the booth, swirling with dust and whiteness, then distilling itself against the screen.

When he began speaking, Samuel's voice sounded different from the way it had the night before; it was ten times more formal now, but it still bore a trace of genuine kindness that she knew she rarely revealed when she was teaching. He gave off an air of trustworthiness. That was when she realized the obvious: Samuel was like her father. He was like David. She was having more and more moments like this, moments when her past was on the tip of her tongue. She didn't know what to do with this swelling past. For now she'd try to quell it and listen, for she was Kate Scott, and Kate Scott had been invited to attend this lecture. With a great surge of concentration, she leaned forward.

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