Tolstoy Lied : A Love Story (9780547527307) by Rachel Kadish Read Free Book Online

more pleasant than the No types. But prone to lecturing.” He follows me out of the kitchenette, back to where we started. “Then you’ve got the armies of Yes-ers: ‘Yes, though I think the Yankees have maybe done better than people realize, but, yes, you’re right.’” Stopping, I enunciate in my most professorial voice. “Sycophants. So conflict-averse they feel compelled to sneak their opinions under the radar.”
    He’s smiling softly.
    Trouble. Delight.
    I crouch down on the carpet, then look at it dumbly. There’s nothing left to clear. “Add the slight British lilt among the graduate students,” I say. “And the all-black wardrobes. And that’s my department in a nutshell.”
    He doesn’t say anything.
    â€œWhich makes us, I guess . . .” my voice drifting to a lame finish, “typical.”
    Beside me he surveys the carpet, no trace remaining of the reckless mess we made together.
    â€œAnd you?” he says. I can’t read his face.
    â€œWhere do I fit in?” I echo.
    A man with a heaped plate of hors d’oeuvres almost stumbles as he comes upon us. As he pivots he lets out a disapproving grunt that unaccountably emboldens me.
    â€œInto the Look-Listener category, I’m afraid. Hence”—I conclude with a flourish of a paper towel—“this lecture.”
    â€œI’m taking notes,” he says after a minute.
    Quietly our eyes meet.
    Â 
    Yolanda is furious. We are striding down Eighth Avenue—me in slacks and a cream-colored blouse, she in a purple leotard and translucent purple skirt, black leggings, and chunky heels. Ignoring most of the men who stare at her, nodding curt acknowledgment to a few, Yolanda races toward her verbal destination with fearsome momentum. She’s been going for at least ten blocks. It’s obvious, though, that she’s still ramping up to the worst bits.
    The problem: Bill will not eat cauliflower.
    â€œHe’s like a little boy who doesn’t want his cauliflower, and you have to keep jollying him into it. And Tracy,
I’m
the cauliflower.” Abruptly Yolanda stops and faces me. “The man cannot commit to an adult relationship.”
    â€œBut we know that.
He
knows that. He told you so the first day you met.”
    â€œWell, you’re not going to believe
this.
” She starts walking again.
    Given the romantic implosion that’s already consumed Yolanda’s month, I find it hard to imagine anything Bill might have done that I wouldn’t believe. Possibly he’s had a sex change operation; possibly he’s renounced gravity and is floating over Manhattan taunting physicists; probably nothing that interesting. Probably he’s been a jerk, which has lost its novelty for everyone except Yolanda, who is still astonished. But foreseeable though this may have been, I feel for Yolanda, who has been earnestly updating meon the details of this particular debacle from the start. The morning Yolanda first heard about the casting call she phoned me in a froth. She was auditioning to play a poet, she could really use this part, did I know anything about someone called H.D.? Five times that day Yolanda called me with questions about Hilda Doolittle—tacitly acknowledging, for the first time in our nineteen-year friendship and despite her long-expressed wish that I jettison my latest paper/grading/reading and join her for disco night at Hot Rocks, that I am indeed a professor. The play, the work of a recent Women’s Literature M.A. from N.Y.U., was a dramatization of H.D.’s analysis with Freud. Yolanda showed me the script. It was a well-meant script; that’s the best one could say for it. In fact, though I didn’t let on to Yolanda, it seemed to me that the author’s signature accomplishment was shaping such rich material into something so insipid and politically heavy-handed. But Yolanda took her audition