Lost and Wanted(91)

    “What?”

“I am my own piece of work. I remember how well your friend Charlotte said that line—Merteuil’s credo.”

“She wanted to go to Oxford, continue studying.”

Pope looked at me, and put a hand on his massive desk. “As I remember it, I encouraged her to persist with a fellowship.”

“But you’d already made that impossible.”

“Those fellowships are very difficult to get.”

“You told her she would get it, though.”

Pope looked politely perplexed by this. “How could I have helped her, if she didn’t even bother to apply?” He sat down, crossed one leg over his knee, and indicated the chair opposite.

I didn’t want to sit. “She was twenty-one.”

“She was brilliant. I was quite taken with her.”

Pope was watching me with his intelligent blue eyes. I thought that Charlie had been right not to come back.

“She moved to L.A.,” I said. “She was very successful there, in television. But then she got pregnant and her disease flared.”

He raised his hands in front of his chest. “You can hardly blame me for that.”

“Hollywood wasn’t good for her. There was a lot of bias and stress.” I was speaking faster than usual: “Sunlight is apparently a trigger—her mother thinks L.A. was a death sentence for her.”

Pope gave me a distasteful look. “That seems somewhat unscientific.”

“I didn’t think you were still on campus. Then I saw you at the memorial.”

“And so you decided to drop in.” He looked me over, then tapped his right hand impatiently on a leather blotter; I saw that he still wore his mother’s ornate sapphire ring. “To discuss Laclos. And your best friend.” There was just a slight emphasis on the last two words, which made them sound juvenile.

“She changed her whole life because of you.”

He paused and leaned back in his chair. “Isn’t that what you all come here for?”

A current of pure rage—it seemed, for a moment, to short-circuit my heart.

“There should have been more about her career at the memorial.” My hands were shaking, but my voice was even. “She went out at the very top.”

    Pope met my stare, but remained silent.

“So few people can say that.”

“It’s rare,” Pope said drily.

There were footsteps in the corridor, and then a knock.

“Come in,” he said.

A woman stepped into the office. She was perhaps in her mid-sixties, wearing Birkenstocks and carrying a backpack, gray hair tucked behind her ears.

“Catherine?” Pope confirmed. He turned to me with a hard little smile. “Catherine is one of my wonderful correspondence students, who’s been kind enough to drive all the way from Woburn.”

Catherine beamed. “It’s such an inspiring class. I have some questions about Molière, but I don’t want to interrupt.”

“Professor Clapp was just leaving,” Pope said. “We were discussing moral ambiguity in Laclos.”

“I’ve seen both movies,” Catherine said. “I’m so eager to read the book.”

“It resists every reductive explanation,” he told Catherine. Then he turned to me: “Like its subject.”

“What is its subject?” I asked.

Pope exaggerated his surprise. “Love,” he said. “It’s a book about love.”





3.


The first weekend in February, Jack was invited to a slumber party. On the way to Miles’s house, we talked about kidnapping. It wasn’t the first time we’d discussed the subject. When I was pregnant, other single parents told me that our bond would be profound in both positive and negative ways, and that Jack might suffer more separation anxiety at school or camp than the average child. That hasn’t been the case, maybe because the scope of my childcare needs got Jack used to a variety of different environments early. I did notice that he had certain fears which might have been more intense than those of children in two-parent families.

    “What if a stranger says, ‘Do you want some candy?’ and you say no in a loud voice, and you run the other way, but the stranger runs after you and grabs you and puts you in his car?”

“Kidnapping is very rare,” I told him.

“But I mean, if?”

“Even when it does happen, in most cases the kidnapper is someone the child already knows.”

This piece of information seemed to intensify Jack’s anxiety rather than comfort him. “Why would someone you know kidnap you?”

“Usually it’s the other parent. For example, if the parents are divorced, and one parent wants more time with the child than they’re allowed in their agreement. And so maybe they take the child and go somewhere for a while, just because they miss them.”

“Like Stella in my class?”

I wondered if I’d gotten myself into more complicated territory than I’d realized, in my attempt to reassure him, “I’m sure neither of Stella’s parents would kidnap her. I just meant that you don’t have to worry about it, because it’s just you and me.”