Page Utilities
Alix Kates Shulman, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (page 4 of 6) Page 4 of 6
The biology building (now gone) was built at the beginning of the last century, with high ceilings, tall windows, dark wooden floors, and old-fashioned oak chairs that turned into
desks when you swiveled up the heavy arm — an awkward maneuver. Scott graciously helped me unfold the arm of my chair. I put down my books and slipped my cardigan over the back of my seat before I flashed my most seductive smile and introduced myself. I couldn’t tell if I’d made an impression on him until two days later, when, arriving in class after me, he scanned the faces in the hall and then made straight for the empty seat beside me.
Scott was a premed student at Duke, on a four-year basketball scholarship, spending his summer back home to earn money and get the extra science credits he needed to graduate the following year. Most of the jocks I knew went to one of the state colleges and studied business administration, not a hard major like premed. I was impressed. But then, I too had sobered up since I’d last seen him. Once a boy-crazy social butterfly, in my senior year I’d withdrawn into a cocoon of my own making and emerged a passionate seeker of knowledge who over the past year had begun to disdain the limitations of our one-track adolescent minds. As I became absorbed by books, my mind became two-track. Perhaps, after three years of college, Scott’s was too? Over burgers and fries at the campus café I tried to draw him out, but as doggedly as I asked my questions, he was determined to deflect them, thus preserving his mystery.
Even if I’d succeeded, what can one know of another soul? — especially at seventeen, when the neural and social networks are more potential than secure. The assumptions we made about each other were based on the flimsiest preconceptions, which set us both up for some surprises. Not that I was surprised to find him an innocent when it came to girls — common enough in boys who thought of little but sports for most of their lives, faced with girls who thought of little but boys for most of theirs. A proud practitioner of feminine wiles as performed in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, I welcomed his social naïveté for the advantage it gave me against his three-year edge in years. But his reticence, his modesty, his lack of even a whiff of macho posturing surprised me in an athlete. In the jock culture of our high school, the athletes I knew were mostly so full of themselves that they thought they could get away with anything, from classroom cheating to rape; and though most of them never stooped that low, even the best were vain and self important. Scott seemed different. Despite his uncommon good looks, he was shy, earnest, and humble, with a sweetness about him that puzzled me.
For his part, he was surprised by what he called my “braininess.” He’d never before had a book-reading girlfriend. He knew his way around a microscope well enough — so well that he succeeded in getting me to see cells floating on a slide — but I doubted he’d read more than half a dozen unassigned books in his entire life. He questioned me about the books I loved, and sometimes he jotted down titles. (A half century later, packing up his studio, I came upon a small notebook of his from that summer, with a list of authors I’d suggested — Mencken, Emerson,Voltaire, and the debut fiction of Capote and Isherwood.) Evidently, I was as exotic to him as he was to me.
On the Friday of our second week, our class went on an expedition to Cleveland’s Holden Arboretum. There, for the first time, Scott and I engineered a few minutes apart. A light rain was falling as we left the parking lot for the trail, allowing us to huddle arm in arm under a single umbrella. Walking slowly with the pretext of collecting leaves, we fell behind the class until we were alone, surrounded by nothing but woods. Scott stopped under the shelter of a tall Ohio buckeye, with its huge handlike leaves spread in benediction; then he took me in his arms and kissed me. Unlike other kisses I’d known, this one felt as chaste as it was ardent. There we stood in the rain, kissing, until Scott pulled away, murmuring an apology. For what? My age? Did he think me an innocent (like him)? Perhaps a virgin?
Time was slipping by; I had to disabuse him quickly, make him recognize me as not your ordinary freshman.
A great pounding, and the studio door bursts open.
Another miracle — it’s Greg Middleton, the island arborist.
“Greg!” I cry giddily. What a relief that the first rescue worker to arrive is not some stranger dropping from a helicopter, but a friend. Never have I been gladder to see anyone. I want to throw myself at his feet, put our lives in his hands.
He sweeps a powerful torch around the studio, then rushes over to Scott and crouches down beside him. “How ya doin’, buddy?” he asks softly. He moves away to report his arrival into a big boxy radio.
“How did you hear?” I ask.
“The radio woke me up. As soon as I heard the dispatcher say Singing Sands Beach, I knew it had to be you. I jumped into my boots and took off.”
“You sleep with the radio on?”
“When I’m on duty I sure do.” He looks up at the sleeping loft. “He fell from way up there? Wow! What happened?”
Before I can answer, there’s more pounding on the door and three more men explode into the room, breathless, wired, filling the small studio with their bristling male energy and the crackling static of their radios. From every corner of the island, one by one, the heroic Long Island Volunteer Fire and Rescue Team burst through the door, then report by radio to the fire chief. They include several lobstermen, a carpenter, the builder who put in our solar, the island gas man, a hospital orderly who commutes to Portland. Some I know, some I don’t. The last to arrive is Tim Lambert, the EMT medic. Taking charge, Tim kneels down to Scott, while the rest of the men huddle around him in a closed circle that excludes me, and asks me for a list of Scott’s medications.
From To Love What Is by Alix Kates Shulman, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Copyright © 2008 by Alix Kates Shulman. All rights reserved. To view or the book, go to www.amazon.com. For more information about author Alix Kates Shulman, go to www.alixkshulman.com.
