History of Wolves(41)

I held her blue gaze. “What do I think, Patra?”

She shifted in her seat, fingered Paul’s hair so he stirred. For a moment, he looked hounded by his dreams. His face crumpled as if he might cry out. He didn’t wake up, though. “I’m the one who stayed after class, who, you know, actually asked him out. It was me, not him.”

I waited for more.

“He was, like—I don’t know. He was bigger than anything else to me at the time.”

I found that hard to believe. I found it difficult to imagine that slippered, thin man leaving such a mark. He seemed insubstantial to me—though stubborn, maybe, like a stain. I thought about how his heel had bulged out of his slipper, how the slipper was worn and black and ugly.

“Once, one of my friends at school ran into him on campus—she was collecting signatures or something, for charity—and she said, there’s something unsettling about him. And I said, I agree! He’s unsettlingly smart. He really is.”

She was justifying herself. She was making a case to me, setting up her defenses. She was trying to convince me of something, and as she spoke I could see she was sitting up straighter, finding focus.

“Listen, Linda.” She was attempting to whisper, so her consonants got especially hissy. “I’m not any good at explaining things. I’m not like Leo in that way. After the semester ended I got him to sit with me in the cafeteria and eat a muffin, and he had a bran and I had a blueberry, and we did that again the next week, and the next, and I remember how he tucked in his shirt when he stood up. You know how that is? How you wait for someone to do this thing, and then he does it? He tucks in his shirt the same way every time he stands up, and it seems, I don’t know, like you don’t have to go to all the work getting to know him because he does this thing, this one thing, and you can predict it. He was so smart, and I felt like I knew him better than he knew himself, right away. That’s very powerful.”

“You liked how he tucked in his shirt?” I was intrigued. I was repulsed.

“No, I knew how he tucked in his shirt. It’s different. And I was flattered. He was just out of graduate school, a big deal on campus for an article he’d published in Nature, and he said to me, oh, maybe, a month or so in, that he hadn’t told me everything about himself. He said he wanted to tell me everything, and, you know, I was nineteen. I was like, oh no, he’s a felon or a pervert or something! I was just a kid.”

“He wasn’t a pervert,” I said.

“No, nothing like that. He just wanted to tell me about his religion, he was a third-generation Christian Scientist, and I laughed at him when he said it, I was so relieved. I was really afraid of what he’d say.”

By then I could see Leo coming down the street. He was shading his eyes with his hand, scanning the crowd for the car. He had two backpacks over his shoulder, mine and Paul’s together, and the big rolling suitcase in one hand. He was half trotting as he went, khaki shorts bunching in the crotch, exposing his pale thighs.

“What happened then?” I asked Patra, feeling urgent about it now.

What I meant was, what are you trying to say to me? I felt that I’d missed something along the way, that the essential part of the story had already come and gone while I’d been looking out the window.

“Oh, I don’t know!” She must have seen Leo too, then, because her voice changed—lowered and glazed over, got sweet and cool, almost arch. “I laughed at how serious he was. Then I married him. I liked that he was serious, and I thought I stood apart.”

Together, we watched as Leo caught sight of the car. He went around back and loaded the trunk. Clearly he couldn’t see us inside, staring right at him, because when he came back around, when he saw his reflection in the car window, he took a deep breath and flattened down a tuft of blown hair at the top of his head. He plucked his shorts out from between his crotch with two fingers. But that wasn’t all.

“Watch,” Patra whispered.

An instant before Leo opened the door, he slid his flattened hands an inch beneath his belt and shoved his blue cotton shirt in deeper. It was an automatic gesture, and he looked a little flustered, as if he wasn’t sure whether he’d be welcomed back in the car—or what he’d find when he opened the door.

Patra said to me, “You think you’re as old as the ages when you’re nineteen, that you’re years past being grown up. You’ll see.”

“Everything okay in here?” Leo asked, sitting down hard in the driver’s seat.

Patra leaned forward, kissed the lobe of his ear.

He swung around to study Paul’s sleeping face, then Patra’s.

“We’re okay,” I answered for her.


The car ride home reshuffled things. The whole way Leo asked me polite but absentee questions about lake fishing and iron ore, and it was Patra who whispered games to Paul in the backseat. We sat in the construction traffic outside Duluth even longer this time around. Through it all, through the orange dust and the black exhaust, Leo spoke to me without turning his head, nodding and noncommittal about my answers. I stopped answering with more than a few words, and finally he stopped asking. An hour, two hours of silence opened up between us. Nobody suggested we stop at Denny’s on the way back. Once the construction ended, I started looking for landmarks I remembered from the day before—the purple water tower, the tunnel blasted through the hillside—but everything looked different from the other direction, and I couldn’t anticipate when these landmarks would appear. I only recognized them in retrospect, the moment we passed, and I had to turn around and watch the water tower receding in the window.