“Why?” Bridget asked.
“Why? Because—” He paused to think. “Because men are jealous, I guess. What else is there?” He looked at her with a certain frankness. Maybe too much frankness. “We are jealous, fallible creatures. We look in our hearts and that’s what we see.”
“Hello?”
There was one reason Tibby picked up the phone Sunday evening and one reason only: She was waiting for a soup delivery and she thought the security guard was calling her room to tell her to come down to get it.
“Hello? Tibby? Are you there?”
She never would have picked up if she’d known it was Lena.
“Tibby? It’s me. Please talk to me. Are you there?”
At the sound of Lena’s voice, Tibby felt the long-suspended tears take position. Up came the worry, the misery. Up, up, and over. Tibby tried to keep her noises to herself. She held the phone away. A tear made a dot on the thigh of the Traveling Pants. One dot and then another. Her body was shaking. A sob made it out.
“Tibby. I’m here. I’m not in a hurry. Just say something so I know you’re there.”
Lena’s softness opened Tibby up in a way that sharpness never could. She tried to suck in enough air to make a word. Her nose was full of snot and tears. Her hand was wet from wiping it. The thing that came out was more of a gurgle than a word.
“Okay, Tib. That’s good. I hear you. You don’t have to say anything if you don’t want.”
Tibby nodded and cried. Discordantly she remembered how she once yelled at her little sister, Katherine, for nodding into the phone rather than saying yes.
“I’ll just hang out here for a while,” Lena said.
“Okay,” Tibby gurgled.
Tibby thought of the times in middle school, before IM’ing really caught on, when they would hang around for hours on the phone playing songs for each other, watching TV shows together.
She thought of the nights she would stay on the phone with Carmen when Carmen’s mom had to work late and Carmen thought she heard noises in the apartment. More than once Tibby had fallen asleep with the phone beside her on the pillow.
Tibby struggled to make some words, if only not to be spooky. “I’m scared—I could be—I might be—” The critical word drowned in salt water. She couldn’t get it out.
Lena hummed in sympathy. Most people when they sensed a crisis got despotically curious, needing to stake out the far boundary of trouble. Tibby appreciated that Lena wasn’t doing that.
Lena was patient while she cried. It took a long time.
“Lenny. I’m a mess,” Tibby said finally. She laughed and accidentally blew her nose at the same time. She was a mess, but even so, she felt a tiny bit closer to sane for admitting it.
“I’m coming, okay?”
“You don’t need to.”
“I want to. It’s easy to.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah.”
Tibby sighed.
“Is there anything I can bring?” Lena asked.
Tibby thought. “Actually, there is.”
“What?”
Tibby tried to clear her throat. “Do you think you could bring a pregnancy test?”
“I thought I was going to be working on sets, actually,” Carmen said to the loosely assembled group drinking iced coffee together on the steps of the theater Sunday evening.
“I heard you didn’t even try out for the other two plays,” said Michael Skelley, a guy from the floor below her.
A certain myth was developing around Carmen’s ascent, she recognized, and she was trying to both cultivate it and set the record straight at the same time. “Only because I didn’t think I was going to try out for any of them. I was watching auditions and Judy told me to read Perdita. That’s kind of how it started.”
Many heads nodded.
“So what’s Ian O’Bannon like?” Rachel asked.
He was the well-known Irish stage actor playing Leontes.
Carmen laughed. “I’m still getting up my nerve to say something to him. At the first read-through you would have thought he’d been playing Leontes for the last twenty years.”
It was strange having all these people look at her, after having almost no one look at her for months. They didn’t know she was adrift in the world, standing outside the current and watching it go by. They didn’t know it, maybe, because she didn’t feel that way right now.
These people were excited for her. They had all made a point of congratulating her. They didn’t know that she was lost and undeserving.
There was really only one person who hadn’t congratulated her and did not appear to be happy for her. That one person did know she was lost and undeserving, and unfortunately, that one person happened to be her friend.
Julia had been cast in the Community Stage production. A choral bit called “Winter” at the very end of the play, wherein she was supposed to dress up like an owl.
Carmen wondered if Judy harbored a certain vitriol for girls she had seen too many times a day.
Tibby cried into her soup when it finally came. “I’m scared I’m pregnant,” she told it. The carrots and peas made no reply, but she felt better for having told them.
She fell asleep in her clothes. In the morning she changed into her pajamas. She waited for Lena in her pajamas. And then she got too impatient for the sight of Lena’s face, so she waited in her pajamas in the lobby instead.
Her underwear felt damp. She registered this almost absently, but she was now too fixed on Lena’s coming to go up and check.
Tibby was standing at the glass door when Lena turned the corner. Tibby went out to the sidewalk and nearly mowed her down. She wasn’t sure if Lena looked more surprised by her clobbering hug or the sight of her pajamas on the bright New York City sidewalk.
Lena held her hand as they went up in the elevator.
“Can you hang on a minute?” Tibby asked when they arrived on her floor.
“Sure.”
Tibby went into the bathroom and came out again less than five seconds later.
“Guess what?” She felt as though her whole body had come undone.
“What?”
“Something got here right before you.” She wanted to keep from smiling, but she couldn’t help it.
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
“I guess we don’t need this, then,” Lena said happily, holding up the plastic drugstore bag.
Tibby took the box out and studied it. It had struck such terrible fear in her in the store. Now it wasn’t scary. “Man, these are expensive.”
“Do you think it will stay good for a decade or two?” Lena asked.
“You keep it,” Tibby said. “I don’t think I could.” She suddenly felt so tired, as though she hadn’t a bone in her body. She fell onto her bed.
“So,” said Lena. She couldn’t be expected to hold off forever. “Are you ready to tell the tale?”
Tibby was. She lay on her bed while Lena sat in the chair by the window. Tibby talked and Lena took out her sketchbook and drew Tibby’s bare feet while she listened. Tibby rode every cramp with the pleasure of a surfer after a hurricane.
What relief. I will remember this feeling, she promised herself, I really will. I won’t take anything for granted again.
On Thursday Nora began a new four-week pose. They drew numbers to pick their spots and Lena got third. She tucked herself up close. She worried through the rest of the picks about another student encroaching on her space. She felt like a bullfrog, swelling up to look as big and dangerous as possible every time a classmate came near.
Leo had the fourteenth and last pick. He set up, to Lena’s astonishment, on a low stool right at Lena’s knees. She thought he was kidding at first. She would have been furious had it been anyone else, but when the pose began he started broadly blocking out the figure, and she was electrified.
Lena could see the model without any obstruction. She could also see the whole of Leo’s back and hands and canvas.
She could watch him work. Had he any idea how much she wanted this? How much she knew she could learn from him?
She watched him breathlessly at first. And when she began to paint, she drew such intensity from his work, she felt as though she had connected her mind to his by a broadband cable and she was conducting a download.
Yes, she was impatient with her old work and her old standards. She was full of self-criticism. But she wasn’t pessimistic. She hadn’t known the possibilities then. Now she was seeing them right in front of her.
They worked straight through the breaks, both she and Leo. By four o’clock Lena’s arm was aching and her legs were asleep, but she didn’t care. The rhythm of her painting life was marked by breakthroughs, and she’d had more today than in the course of the entire school year.
She and Leo packed up silently and walked out together. It was hard to come down. She was speechless with stimulation and gratitude and excitement. She was like a closet packed too full. If you pulled one thing out, the rest would tumble after.
He seemed to know how she was feeling. He put a hand on her arm by way of good-bye. “I’ll see you Saturday,” he said.
That night as Lena lay in her bed, her body and her head were achingly full. She wasn’t sure under what categories to store these different feelings.
There was desire. Maybe love. Or lust. There was the excitement of the breakthrough. The visitation of the art spirit. How these things fit together she didn’t know.
In rare nights of swollen-hearted yearning (as painful as they were sweet), she allowed herself to fall asleep to amorous thoughts of Kostos: the things they had done, the things she fantasized they had done, the things she imagined they would do if they ever had the chance to be together again, impossible though that was.
Tonight she let the amorous images roll. But tonight she thought of Leo.
Bridget sat in the field laboratory doing some cursory recording and paperwork. She stamped and mailed a letter to Greta and waited to use the computer. She hadn’t checked her e-mail in four days. Eric was probably wondering what happened to her.
She let big parts of days, whole days, go by without thinking of him. How could she let herself do that? Well, she was occupied with her floor, of course. But more worryingly, whenever she was around Peter, she let herself forget about Eric. That was wrong.
Almost since the day Eric had left for Mexico, she had been unable to picture his face. It was puzzling. She could sort of see the outline of his head, the general shape of his hair, but the middle was a blur. Why was that? She could picture people she didn’t care about. She could easily picture the fat-faced bursar at school. She could picture her roommate Aisha’s older sister, who had visited once. Why couldn’t she picture her own boyfriend? Why couldn’t she hold Eric in her mind when he was not with her? She knew intellectually that she loved him, but she couldn’t find a way to feel it just now.
And why not? Why couldn’t she reconstruct feelings that were so powerful when she was in his presence?
Because he wasn’t in her presence.
Was there something wrong with her heart? Was it failing to function? Did nothing get to her?
She thought of Peter and felt her heart kick up. No, it was working. It was working all too well.
But it was a limited heart, she realized, a literal heart that seemed to beat only in the present tense. Like desert air, it couldn’t hold on to heat once the sun was gone. Like a sluice, it seemed to work in one direction—forward, not back.
What would she write to Eric? What would she say? Would he detect that her tone was forced or evasive? Was he jealous? Was he fallible?
A guy named Martin came out of the office as she stood up to go in. “Don’t bother,” he said. “The satellite system is down.”
“No e-mail at all?” she asked.
He shook his head.
Guiltily, she felt happy to have the excuse rather than sad to have the problem. She passed Peter on her way out. “Is the hookup still down?” he asked her.
She nodded. “I hadn’t realized.”
“Since this morning,” he said. “We’re cut off, I’m afraid.”
On her way through the lab she checked the mortuary section. “How’s my girl Clytemnestra?” she asked the main biologist, Anton.
He seemed to enjoy the fly-by visits from Bridget. “We’ve got all of her. We’re doing some good work.”
“Like what?” she asked breezily.
“How old she was, what she ate, how she died.”
“Really. How did she die?”
“In childbirth.”
Bridget felt her face changing. “You can tell that?”
“Not with certainty. But it’s likely.”
She nodded. “How old was she?”
“Probably around nineteen or twenty.”
Bridget’s step was heavier as she left the lab than when she’d entered. She found herself wondering whether Clytemnestra’s baby had lived. What if they found a tiny skeleton as well? Would they call the fearless Bridget over for that?
Bridget bowed her head low passing the gravesite. Clytemnestra was thousands of years old, but it occurred to Bridget that she would always be nineteen or twenty.
Oh, Lordy, Bee.
I’ve got a lot of stuff to tell you. I think your e-mails might not be getting through. I can’t write it in this letter, but call me soon, okay?
Have fun with these here Pants and don’t do anything I wouldn’t do. Which should severely limit your options. But, ahem, may include one thing you might not THINK you could do but which I might in fact be capable of doing or even have done. Hint, hint.
Did I just write that sentence?
Love you,
Tibby
“Maybe not this weekend,” Tibby found herself saying to Brian over the phone.
“I could come just for Sunday.”
“I have to work on Sunday. And also, I have to get my stuff ready for classes starting on Monday.”
“Oh. Right.”
She could hear Brian walking around his room. She knew the tread of his shoes, the creaky sound of the floor, and the particular ratio of carpet to wood.
“I could just come for the night on Wednesday,” he suggested.
Why couldn’t Brian see that he should let it go for a while? Why was he so obtuse?
“Midweek isn’t good,” she pronounced. If he was going to be obtuse, she wasn’t going to bother with intricate excuses.
“Next weekend, then.”
“Maybe.”
She heard him pacing. “Tibby?”
“Yeah?”
“The thing we were really worried about…”
He wanted her to interrupt him, to put words in the blank, but she did not oblige.
“You said before…you’re not…worried anymore?”
“No. I told you. I think it’s okay.”
She’d been so joyful at this news on Sunday. Why couldn’t she let him be a part of it? She was stingy with the bad news and even stingier with the good.
She hung up the phone and sat on her floor, wondering. Why was she annoyed at him? Her period was full force; she was no longer afraid of pregnancy. No foul, no fault. (Or how did that go?) Why couldn’t she go back to feeling happy? She’d thought the single red spot on her underwear would put everything back to right, but it hadn’t. Why not?
It was as though something inside Tibby had gotten turned in the wrong direction.
The uncertainty in his voice, the number of times he called, his desperate desire for reassurance. Why did this bother her so much?
But strangely, this question she meant to ask was undermined by a deeper question she didn’t mean to ask: Why hadn’t it bothered her before?
Leo appeared, as a good model should, at exactly the designated hour of nine o’clock.
Lena opened the door to her tiny dorm room and let him in. She’d been sitting on her bed in her quiet room for the preceding twenty minutes, hands sweating, mind blank. r />
She could not hide her nervousness. There was no point.
“You ready?” he asked. Was his voice pitched slightly higher than usual?
“I think so,” she squeaked. She gestured toward her French easel, upon which was perched her freshly gessoed eighteen-by-twenty-four-inch canvas. Her palette was ready. Her paints were assembled.
With him inside it, her room was almost comically small. How, exactly, was this going to work? How could she get far enough away to see more than three inches of his rib cage? She hadn’t thought this through very well. (She couldn’t even manage to think about it.)
“Should I be…on the bed?” he asked. He was uncertain too. His uncertainty made her both more terrified and slightly more in control. Somebody had to steer the ship.
“I thought…yes. Only—”
“Yeah, you can’t exactly—”
“Yeah, it’s pretty close.”
“What if I…”
He tried lying across the bed a few different ways, clothes blessedly on. Each time she found herself staring directly, and at close range, into his crotch.
Somewhere deep inside, Lena knew this was funny, but so panicked was she, she could no more access a laugh than if she were in the middle of a plane crash.
He seemed to recognize this. He sat up. “What about a seated pose?” he said.
He tried a few of those.
Lena backed up as far as she could. With his help she moved her dresser and sat with her back pressed against the wall. She shook her head. “I think this only works if we cut a hole in the wall and I paint you from Dana Trower’s room.”
He shrugged. “Dana might not go for it.”
Was it too soon to give up? They’d given it the old summer-school try. Maybe they could just go have another iced coffee.
“I think I know the answer,” he said.
Iced coffee? She cleared her throat. “What’s that?”
“Foreshortening.”
“Yeah?”